FORT LEE, Va. — As service members prepare to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of post-service life, they don’t have to plot coordinates and determine azimuths alone.
Fort Lee Transition Assistance Program employees assist by providing career and employment skills training opportunities that clear and make visible the employment pathways and horizons available after separation.
One of TAP’s main efforts is the Army Career Skills Program which gives service members opportunities to participate in career and employment skills training programs during the last 180 days of military service (with duration limits based on rank) to improve employment options after separation.
“This program is for service members who are transitioning because basically it gives them the opportunity to better themselves instead of getting out and having nothing,” said Cherelle Cobbins, Fort Lee Career Skills Program coordinator. “The CSP is the program that helps them get some type of certification or hands-on experience.”
The Army Career Skills Program is a component of the Transition Soldier Life Cycle model that encourages Soldiers to take advantage of training and development opportunities throughout their military careers.
“It allows them to see what the civilian world looks like,” said Nastelle Graves, the Fort Lee transition services manager. “Many service members have never worked in corporate America or even in a warehouse. It’s a right of every person to choose what that next place looks like.”
CSP pathways are: apprenticeship, internships, job shadowing, on-the-job training and employment skills training. Most opportunities are provided at no cost with partner industries investing in their future workforce by paying for the training, often followed by an interview for an open position.
Occupational industries include: automotive maintenance; human resources; food management; electrical; logistics; welding; plumbing; heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration.
Service members can use the experience and/or certification they gain from CSP to find their next job, Cobbins said.
Cobbins leads a CSP briefing the first Thursday of the month that is both in-person and virtual for service members outside a 50-mile radius.
The briefing is open to transitioning service members within two years of Expiration Term of Service or retirement, spouses of active duty service members and veterans.
For CSP coordinators, the CSP briefing is just one starting location from which to launch career navigators in a specific direction of travel.
“I provide them with information on what programs are out there, assist with the paperwork, anything that makes the process easier for them to find something,” Cobbins said. “I sit down with them to get an understanding of what they want to do, research, make sure they understand the CSP, walk through the process of getting their unit’s approval, answer questions on retirement.”
Sometimes a client’s career field interest is so unique that CSP coordinators lead a search to help connect the service member with a curated individual internship.
At Fort Lee, these individual internships are more common.
“More than 65% of the service members here at Fort Lee [in the CSP internship program] do individual internships,” Graves said. “Larger installations that have CSP have cohorts where a company is on that installation, and they’re training them to be mechanics, they’re training them to be IT. We don’t have that type of space for training.”
Everybody wants to do something different, Cobbins said.
Each service member’s situation is unique, and for those who have not planned well for what career they want to pursue after service, the TAP office is perhaps more of a lifeline than a navigational guide.
The Army CSP touts an impressive 93% hire rate with more than 50,000 Soldiers having completed one of 226 CSPs and partnering with more than 4,000 employers at 31 worldwide installations since 2013.
This history of success was “born” out of a need to offer opportunity to wounded, ill and injured service members recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC., and it grew into CSP, Graves said.
Amy Moorash was an education counselor at Walter Reed and was one of several individuals including the medical team, Wounded Warrior Brigade and the Transition Employment Assistance Management Service who coordinated and supported career training programs offered through federal agencies and corporations in the area, Graves said. Moorash took the work at Walter Reed to another level after her rise as the Army Education Services director at Installation Management Command.
The CSP, then, is one of those common-sense Army programs born out of ingenuity which honors service members by creating opportunities for them to continue contributing positively to society after service.
CSP coordinators and TAP employees help clear the haze of uncertainty for service members, as they attempt to traverse the fields of civilian sector employment.
To learn more contact Fort Lee CSP coordinator Cherelle Cobbins at 571.644.5816 or cherelle.d.cobbins.ctr@army.mil