A Problem Entrepreneurs Should Solve: Veterans not getting Jobs

8 points by axsar 13 years ago | 7 comments

Watch the Daily Show from Oct 24, 2012 with Dakota Meyer.

Earlier in the show at around 10 minute mark there are two veterans. They talk about the difficulty of getting a job related to their professional training in the military and then doing a mock interview. Both of the veterans are medics, so the jobs they are interested in are nursing field related. A field where we have a sharp shortage of workers...

Yet it is really hard for veterans to get a job because most professional license boards do not accept military certification or training. Even if they have a lot of experience doing the job in the field, in combat and under fire. They need to go back to school to restart their learning to get some trade licenses.

This is pretty horrible when we are have shortage of these professional across the country and we have veterans who want those jobs. I think it is also an opportunity for entrepreneurs.

There are peoples economic welfare at stake and there is a lot of money to be made, in good way, solving this problem.

Paul Graham maybe you can make a new RFS??

Daily Show Link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-october-24-2012-dakota-meyer

jauer 13 years ago |

I don't think this is Hacker News, but... Seems to me like the gap between military certification and professional licensing is due to protectionism (due to the number of veterens) and politics (because the military can be forced to innovate and iterate on a much shorter cycle than the professional community would like).

I was reading the other day about how military trauma response is pretty far ahead of the civilian law enforcement world. Particularly how with $100 in basic medical supplies and a little training you can quickly treat gunshot and blast wounds that typically cause the victim to bleed out before EMS can arrive.

timjahn 13 years ago |

Brittany Laughlin is working on this for the tech sector with her new company Incline (http://inclinehq.com).

axsar 13 years ago | |

Thats interesting. Thanks for the link. Yet that is different, because it's teaching them a brand new skill. There needs to be something to help them transfer the skills.

joonix 13 years ago |

What does this have to do with hackers? This has to do with laws, legislation, and authority.

SquareWave 13 years ago | |

What does this have to do with hackers? Good question, since I understand that hacking just pertains to programming. I must of been thinking of "solving hard problems" was for some other term.

malandrew 13 years ago | | |

Completely agree, but in Silicon Valley usually applies to solving hard problems that involves technology and not hard problems that involve changing legislation unless it is the "ask for forgiveness, not permission" approach of an Uber or AirBnB. I don't see that approach working in a space where medical care is being given.

Licensing boards and organizations for medical care and legal advice are well funded and smart. These are not exactly the organizations you want to be up against as a startup. Taxi commissions are trivial adversaries in comparison.

If you want to solve hard problems that involve changing legislation, then you need to be on the other side of the country in Washington D.C. YCombinator and other accelarators, incubators and tech investors are hardly equipped and networked to help a startup in the policy arena succeed. It's simply a bad investment.