What is the Career Center?
The Career Center is an integrated job search platform with tools for exploring VA career opportunities that match your military background, experience, interests and strengths. Much more than a job search engine, Veteran job seekers can identify their ideal civilian career by using the Career Center’s integrated tools and explore open positions at VA.
How do I start using the Career Center?
You can begin using the Career Center at multiple points. The Career Center’s powerful tools work together to let you tailor your user experience and explore the VA jobs that most closely mirror your talents, interests and experience. Start by translating your military skills, taking self-assessments or conducting a job search. Go one step further by creating civilian-friendly resumes, apply to best-matched jobs through USAJOBS.gov, save custom searches and receive job match alerts or RSS feeds.
What types of self-assessments are available?
The Career Center offers the following custom self-assessments:
- Work Experience and Skills Inventory: Evaluate the breadth of your prior work experience and your desire to pursue similar types of work in the future.
- Basic Skills Inventory: Measure your self-reported proficiencies against the foundational, work-related skills that serve as the foundation for successful performance in many occupations.
- Interest Inventory: Clearly define your occupational interests and work preferences.
- General Aptitude Battery: Test your math aptitude (i.e., the ability to perform basic math problems and more advance computations), language aptitude (i.e., knowledge of vocabulary and common language usage) and perceptual speed and accuracy (i.e., the ability to quickly and accurately identify discrepancies in lists of information).
Collectively, the results will be used to identify occupations that are a best match for you based on your experiences and interests, basic skills, occupational interests and general aptitude.
Why should I take self-assessments?
Taking the VA for Vets self-assessments will help clarify your professional strengths and interests. You can identify your levels of proficiency associated with common skills (like leadership or time management). After you complete the assessments, you can use the information to update your resume in the resume builder.
How does the Military Skills Translator work?
The Military Skills Translator interprets your military experience and training into language that civilian employers can easily understand.
- Begin by entering your military occupation code (MOS), area of concentration (AOC), Air Force specialty code (AFSC) or Navy enlisted classification (NEC). You can also enter and save multiple codes and classifications.
- Continue by adding your rate/rank and selecting primary, secondary and tertiary responsibilities.
- You can then select specialties and sub-specialties, training and education, collateral duties, technical and soft skills.
As you add professional information, the Career Center will show you open VA positions in which you would most likely succeed.
Can I post my current resume to the Career Center?
Yes, you can upload existing resumes and cover letters to the Career Center. In fact, you can store up to five resumes and cover letters, which you can use to apply to available VA jobs through USAJOBS.gov―or save as a Word document for future use.
You can also activate your desired resume to allow recruiters to search for and contact you through the VA’s Veteran resume database.
Can I only use the job search feature?
Yes. Use as many or as few of the Career Center tools as you’d like. But keep in mind, all the tools work together to show you the breadth of VA positions best matched to your skills, interests and background.
What’s unique about the job search?
The job search is as unique as you are: the more tools you use and information you provide, the more tailored your job search results become. Your inputs drive the selection and display of VA job descriptions ranked on relevancy to your experience and skills.
For example: if you were enlisted in the Army as a Financial Management Technician (36B) at E7+, you will see a list of appropriate job openings. Add your sub-specialties and training to narrow down the job listings and find the best fit for you.
Not only will you be able to search through all available jobs at VA, the search engine integrates with USAJOBS.gov to enable easy resume uploading. You can save multiple jobs that you are interested in and apply at a later time, if you wish.
What are the benefits of using the Career Center?
The Career Center integrates data to produce custom job search results and allows you to match expertise, skills and training to actual VA jobs―all in one place. The tools work together to provide an accurate picture of where you are today professionally and where you might go as you continue your career development. Better yet, all of your activities in the Career Center, including assessments, skills translation, resumes and saved jobs are captured and displayed in your personalized VA for Vets dashboard, which grows with you as your qualifications evolve and new jobs become available.
How is the Career Center different from other Veteran job search offerings?
The Career Center consolidates many of the tools available on disparate Veteran job websites into an easy-to-use platform―providing one central, permanent place for continuous career management. Most websites provide single job search capabilities but lack the additional resources to help Veterans develop a career (not just a job) that’s best suited to your experience and interests. In addition, the Military Skills Translator is the most thorough application available, providing the ability to match your actual experience in uniform to open jobs that are a good fit for your skills, knowledge and abilities.
I just created my Career Center profile but there are no jobs available for me at this time. What should I do?
Sign up for the RSS feed and email alerts to receive notification when appropriate opportunities are available. We encourage you to continue using the Career Center to search open positions at VA. You can also use the resumes and cover letters you created through the Career Center to apply for other jobs.