Dive Brief:
- At a White House event, first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden Thursday celebrated the fifth anniversary of Joining Forces, an initiative focused on encouraging employers to hire veterans and military spouses – helping cut veteran joblessness in half since 2011, according to various media reports.
- At the event, AT&T announced plans to hire an additional 10,000 veterans for a total of 20,000 by 2020. AT&T had originally, in 2013, committed to hiring 10,000 veterans within the next five years. They succeeded by 2015.
- Another large employer, Amazon, doubled its number of veteran employees by hiring more than 10,000 veterans and military spouses since 2013. CEO Jeff Bezos pledged that his company will hire 25,000 more during the next five years. He added that Amazon will train 10,000 additional veterans and military spouses in cloud computing, "providing a gateway into a high-demand, good-paying field."
Dive Insight:
At Thursday's event, most participating employers announced commitments to hire more than 110,000 veterans and train nearly 60,000 vets and their spouses over the next five years, primarily in the fields of aerospace, telecommunications and technology.
The Joining Forces program works with employers to help veterans and their families apply for jobs and seek training during the often stressful adjustment from military to civilian life. Joining Forces has helped dramatically boost the hiring of veterans and their spouses since 2011, as more than 1.2 million veterans and spouses have been hired or trained through via the initiative.
"While in the service, I often wondered if the self-discipline, teamwork and skills I was gaining would help me find a fulfilling career," says JoHanna Martinez, AT&T Talent Acquisition, and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. "Fifteen years later, I now know that those skills have been the foundation to every success in my career. Because those values are part of the AT&T culture, too."
