The Skills Gap Veterans Can Help You Fill

You have open reqs that stay open for months. The pipeline is thin. The candidates who do apply are missing one or two skills you actually need. Sound familiar?

Most midsize companies feel this same squeeze. There are plenty of job openings and not enough people with the right mix of skills. So roles sit empty. Work piles up on the team you already have. And the cost of an unfilled seat keeps climbing.

There is a talent pool most hiring teams overlook. Veterans. The military trains people in the exact skills that show up on your hardest-to-fill reqs. Technical depth. Leadership. Process discipline. Security and safety habits. The training is real, it is recent, and it is paid for by someone other than you.

This piece is built for the person inside the company who wants to push veteran hiring forward. Maybe that is you. You see the gap. You think veterans can help close it. You just need the case laid out clearly. Then you can take it to your VP or CFO. Here it is.

What is the skills gap, really?

A skills gap is the space between the skills you need and the skills your applicants have. It is not the same as a labor shortage. There are people looking for work. They just do not match what the role asks for.

The numbers back this up. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 7.6 million job openings in April 2026, with hires running below that pace. Roles stay open because the right skills are hard to find.

The gaps cluster in a few areas. Technical and trade skills. Leadership and people management. Project and operations discipline. Security and compliance roles that need a cleared or trusted hire. These are the seats that sit empty the longest.

Here is the part most hiring teams miss. The military trains for every one of those areas. Not in theory. In daily practice, under real pressure, with real stakes. A service member does not read about logistics. They run it. They do not study leadership in a classroom. They lead a team of 12 at 22 years old.

So the question is not whether veterans have skills. It is whether your hiring process can spot those skills under a different set of words.

Which in-demand skills does military training build?

Let me map the gaps to the training. These are the skill areas employers struggle to fill, and what the military does to build them. This is the heart of your business case. Match a gap on your team to a place the military already produces that skill.

Technical and IT skills

Cyber, networks, systems, and IT support are some of the hardest roles to staff. The military runs its own networks, secures its own systems, and trains people to do it young. A signals or cyber operator handles tools and threats that mirror the private sector. Many hold certifications you already screen for, like Security+ or CISSP.

If you are building an IT or security team, this pool runs deep. We cover the details in our guide on hiring veterans for software and tech roles.

Leadership and people management

This is the one civilians underrate the most. A 26-year-old sergeant has led teams, owned budgets, and made calls with real consequences. They have trained their own replacements. They have run a unit when the boss was gone.

You cannot teach that in an onboarding week. It comes from years of doing it. For the full picture, see the leadership skills veterans bring that few other candidates can match.

Project and operations management

Military work is project work. Plan the mission. Stage the resources. Hit the timeline. Adjust when it falls apart. A logistics or operations service member moves people, parts, and equipment across the world on a deadline. That is supply chain and program management by another name.

Security, safety, and compliance

Roles that need a security clearance, a safety record, or strict compliance are brutal to fill. The military builds these habits into everyone. Follow the procedure. Document the work. Pass the inspection. Many veterans already hold an active or recent clearance, which can save you months and real money.

Why does this talent stay hidden from most employers?

If veterans have the skills, why are reqs still open? The problem is rarely the candidate. It is the gap between how a veteran describes the work and how your team reads a resume.

A veteran writes "led fire team in dynamic environments." Your recruiter sees words they do not know and moves on. The skill is there. The translation is missing. So a strong candidate gets ranked low and never reaches a human who could spot the fit.

Your applicant tracking system makes this worse. It racks and stacks resumes by keyword match. If the veteran's resume says "battalion S4" and your req says "supply chain coordinator," the system scores it low. A great hire sinks to the bottom of the list. Nobody rejected them. They just never surfaced.

This is fixable. When veterans translate their experience into civilian terms, the match becomes obvious. That translation is the whole job of a tool like BMR. We help veterans turn military roles into the language your reqs use. So when you search our pool, the fit is already clear.

How do you build the internal business case?

You know the talent is there. Now you need to convince the people who control headcount and budget. Keep it simple and tie it to numbers your leaders already track.

Lead with the cost of the open req. Every week a role sits empty has a price. Lost output. Overtime for the team covering the gap. Recruiter hours spent on a thin pipeline. Put a dollar figure on it. That gets attention faster than any feel-good pitch.

Then show veterans as a new source of supply for that exact gap. You are not asking to lower the bar. You are asking to widen the funnel into a pool trained for the skills you need. For a deeper script, use our guide on the internal business case for veteran hiring.

The ask should be small. Do not pitch a giant program. Pitch a pilot. Source one or two open reqs from veterans and measure the result. A small ask is an easy yes. A win on the pilot makes the next ask much bigger.

Does the data support hiring veterans to fill skill gaps?

Your CFO wants proof, not a story. The good news is the labor data and the hiring data both point the same way.

Start with availability. The veteran unemployment rate sat at 3.5 percent in 2025, per BLS. These are people who work, who want to work, and who carry recent training. They are not a niche group. Hundreds of thousands separate from service every year.

Now look at where the economy is heading. BLS projects total employment to grow by about 5.2 million jobs from 2024 to 2034. Healthcare and other skill-heavy sectors lead the way. The gaps are not closing on their own. The teams that build a veteran pipeline now will be ahead when the squeeze gets worse.

Retention is the quiet win. Veterans are used to mission and team. They tend to stick. Lower turnover means you refill the seat less often, which is real money back to the budget. We dig into this in our piece on the ROI of hiring veterans.

How do you stop screening veterans out by accident?

You can have the best business case and still lose these candidates at the screen. The fix is changing how you read the resume and how you write the req.

Drop the degree screen where it does not belong. Many skill-heavy roles do not need a four-year degree. They need the skill. A hard degree filter cuts out strong veterans who learned the work in service. We walk through this in skills-based hiring for veterans.

Teach your recruiters to read military roles. A short cheat sheet helps. Match common military jobs to your open reqs. Then the team knows a logistics NCO maps to a supply chain coordinator. Our guide on how to map a military career field to your open reqs gives you the framework.

And clear out the myths. Some hiring managers carry old ideas about veterans that simply are not true. Those beliefs quietly kill good candidates. We take them apart one by one in myths about hiring veterans, debunked.

Write the req so veterans can find themselves in it

Small wording changes pull in more qualified veterans. List the skill, not the exact job title you imagine. Say what the person will do, not what degree they must hold. Name the certifications that matter and let the rest go. A req written around skills lets a trained veteran see the match right away.

Where do you find veterans who fit your gaps?

The case is made. Now you need the people. The slow way is to post a job and hope the right veteran finds it. The faster way is to search a pool that has already translated their skills into your language.

That is what BMR is built for. Veterans use our tools to turn their service into civilian skills and clear job titles. More than 1,000 new veteran profiles get added every month. Over 72,624 resumes have been built on the platform. So the supply is fresh and it keeps growing. I started BMR after my own messy transition, and the whole point is to make this match easy for both sides.

Instead of waiting for the right resume to appear, you search by the skill you need. The translation work is already done. You see the fit, you reach out, you fill the seat.

Your next step

The skills gap is not going away. The labor data says so, and your open reqs say so louder. You can keep fighting a thin pipeline. Or you can open a new lane of trained talent that most competitors ignore.

Start small. Pick one or two hard-to-fill reqs. Map them to the military roles that build that skill. Take the four-point case to your leader and ask for a pilot. Then go find the people.

When you are ready to see who fits your gaps, reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool. The skills you need are already in there, already in your language. You just have to look.