National Veterans Employment Strategy

Every year, thousands of Regular and Reserve Forces members transition from the military without guidance on how to find employment in the private and public sectors. During their military service, members develop unique skills from first-class training and experiences that make them vital assets to the civilian workforce. VAC is working on a strategy to connect Veterans and employers to leverage these skills resulting in finding meaningful employment after service.

To help develop the National Veterans Employment Strategy, we consulted with members of the Veteran and employer community from 19 September to 31 October 2022.

VAC promoted the consultation on all social media channels, My VAC Account, via email, and in the Salute! newsletter to help us reach as many Veterans and stakeholders as possible.

Through 21 questions (including six open-ended ones), we asked respondents to share their thoughts on Veteran employment. Questions focused on the following topics:

• Demographics
• Expectations for employment
• Barriers encountered while job searching
• Ways to reduce barriers
• Types of support needed

From the 1,016 people participated in the consultation, we received 945 submissions in English and 71 in French.

Key takeaways

• While some Veterans transition to civilian work right away, others feel they aren’t given enough time to be ready to enter civilian workplaces. In that latter case, they may be excluded from resources because they do not meet time-related eligibility criteria.
• Some Veterans want to do work that is new and unrelated to their military experience. Others would like to do similar work, but are frustrated that their military occupations don’t translate well into civilian work, and want civilian equivalencies to be easier to obtain.
• Many Veterans feel they are seen as either too young to obtain senior positions, or too old for companies to be interested in hiring them.

In the winter of 2022-23, we will publish a final report on the VAC website.

The data we collected from this consultation will be used to guide and develop the National Veterans Employment Strategy, as well as other initiatives at VAC and the Government of Canada.

The department and the Office of the Minister of Veterans Affairs will continue working together with stakeholders and Veterans to further identify barriers and solutions to dismantle them.