Industry programs offer employment opportunities and support.
Boot camp was a long time ago for me. A very long time ago. But boot camp is also a special kind of hell that you never forget if you’ve been through it. There was a lot of marching in boot camp. If you weren’t running double-time to get somewhere, you were marching. In between, you were doing push-ups. While marching sounds like a fairly mindless endeavor, I along with other veterans will tell you that it is anything but.
I happened to be in boot camp over the Thanksgiving holiday when I was a seaman recruit. The Thanksgiving weekend fell right about the middle of our 10 weeks of training, so we’d been learning how to march as a group, or company, for about five or six weeks when Thanksgiving got close. The week before the Thanksgiving weekend, we were told that we were going to get a half-day of liberty off base on Thanksgiving Day. This was an unexpected surprise since boots normally didn’t get liberty, and the thought of going to a real restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner instead of the mess hall sounded almost too good to be true.
And you know what they say when something sounds too good to be true.
Each Friday during boot camp we had inspection in our dress blues and then marched in formation around the parade ground. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, there was a recruit company graduating and going on to their first duty stations so there was lots of family and friends in the stands for our march around the parade ground. We typically marched behind the marching band, and behind other recruit companies in order of seniority.
For some reason, on this particular Friday our recruit company commander decided to march at a different cadence than that of the music the marching band was playing. For the guys up front who could see him, that was fine, but in the middle of our formation the rest of us had no idea what was going on up there. We were just marching to the cadence of the marching band. By the time we passed the review stand, full of guests and officers, we were so out of step that we were stepping on another guy or getting stepped on by another guy, and basically getting our legs tangled. We were a train wreck in dress blues.
I still remember it as one of the great embarrassments of my life, but that was nothing compared to what our red-faced drill instructor was feeling when he entered the barracks. Needless to say, our Thanksgiving liberty was canceled and we ended up spending Thanksgiving night running around the grinder with our M-16s. The only thing I was thankful for that Thanksgiving was that the dinner in the mess hall was so bad I didn’t eat much, so I was able to survive the grinder without losing anything I’d consumed for my holiday dinner.
I never much cared for marching after graduating from boot camp and, fortunately for me, there wasn’t a lot of marching to be done on a 378-foot-high endurance cutter at sea.
But I’m a little more enthusiastic about marching today when I see how the contact center industry is marching in step with both veterans and active-duty military, supporting those who have served and those still serving today.
I recently had the good fortune to come across SourceAmerica www.sourceamerica.org and learn about the work they are doing with disabled people across all spectrums. SourceAmerica works directly with non-profit agencies in order to create employment opportunities for people with disabilities, including disabled veterans. Whether these veterans have suffered combat-related injuries, PTSD or age-related disabilities post-service, SourceAmerica works to ensure these individuals are gainfully employed, and many of them end up working in the contact center.
One such individual is Jeff Carver, a disabled veteran who found an entry-level position as a Customer Care Representative (CCR) at InspiriTec in September 2011. Carver retired from the Army as First Sergeant after 22 years of service, including three combat deployments to Iraq and Bosnia. Disability ended his Army career and Carver sought employment in the civilian world.
After sending over 200 resumes and netting only two interviews, he decided to exercise a tactical shift and found his contact center job with the help of SourceAmerica. Over the course of the past six years, Carver has relied on the skills and experience gained during his military service to earn multiple promotions. Today he serves as Deputy Director of InspiriTec’s Department of Defense contract base in Fort Knox, Ky. He manages a team of 254 employees in a contact center that takes over 100,000 calls monthly.
In 2014, Carver won SourceAmerica’s Evelyne Villines Award for outstanding job performance by an individual with a significant disability.
“These are men and women who’ve sacrificed so much for our country, they deserve the dignity of work and financial stability for themselves and their families,” said Steve Soroka, SourceAmerica president and CEO. “Our mission is to ensure that people with disabilities have the opportunities and support they need to thrive in the workplace. And as a Navy veteran myself, I’m really proud that so many veterans find second careers through our 700-plus nonprofits across the country.”
In 2011, then First Lady Michele Obama launched the Joining Forces program, a nationwide initiative calling for all Americans to rally around military service members, veterans and their families, and support them through education and employment opportunities, among other things. The program caught the eye of Angela Garfinkel, founder and president of Quality Contact Solutions (QCS) in Aurora, Neb.
QCS’s Garfinkel comes from a military family with a father who served during the Vietnam war, a stepfather who served in Korea and two brothers who are both career military. Seeing her sisters-in-law go through the disruption and upheaval of moves every two to three years, combined with the fact that they often had to take low-level jobs because they weren’t in one place long enough to earn job promotions, inspired her to contact Joining Forces and get involved with the program.
Today QCS has a Military Spouse Team of contact center professionals who work exclusively from home, so if their spouse gets transferred to a new duty station the spouse simply unplugs the home agent setup in the old home and plugs back in when he or she is settled into new quarters. Garfinkel calls their at-home team of military spouses a big win for QCS.
“We’ve found our military spouse employment program has netted us a group of high-caliber, ambitious people who work hard and are very loyal to QCS,” said Garfinkel. “These are people who are typically discriminated against in the workplace because employers know they’re going to be gone in a couple of years. They get passed over for promotion and treated like temp workers. With us, when they move they take their job with them and let us know when they’re ready to go back to work after they settle in.”
“Supporting military families is one of those feel-good things to do,” Garfinkel noted. “We remain committed to the program.”
I’ve always been proud of being a veteran and being a member of an exclusive community that represents only about 6% of the U.S. population. Today I’m particularly proud of being a veteran employed in the contact center industry—an industry that is truly in step with the needs of both veterans and active-duty military.