How a Change to Military Benefits Will Affect Millions of Workers

“The primary challenge for me, like many veterans, was deciding what I wanted to do,” says Lance Sapera, a recruiter on the talent acquisition team at Intuit in San Francisco, of his transition out of the military in 2007. A retired Navy commander, Sapera spent time with people in different professions and at various companies to understand their corporate culture and find employers whose values aligned with his.

Each year, 200,000 veterans re-enter the civilian workforce. Thanks to retirements, retirements for medical reasons, ”voluntary early separations,” and involuntary discharges, there is a huge amount of turnover in the U.S. military. This churn has been compounded by the drawdown, the reduction in the number of active-duty soldiers from 570,000 in 2012 to a planned 450,000 in 2018.