I am sure most of you have heard the popular story of the old man, little boy, and beach full of star fish.
But for those that haven’t, essentially an old man happens upon a wee lad on the beach early one morning, and the lad is tossing star fish on the beach back into the receding ocean. One at a time. And there are hundreds of them. This prompts the old man to say to the boy “What are you doing?”, to which the boy replies “Throwing these star fish back into the sea so they don’t dry up and die”. To the boy’s retort, the old man in his “conventional wisdom” says “You can’t possibly make a difference! There are hundreds of them!”. Undaunted, the lad picks up a star fish, runs down to the water, tosses it far out into the sea, runs back to the old man, and says “I made a difference to that one”.
That’s why I founded Vets2PM and the Veteran Project Manager Mentor Alliance, to help military project managers, i.e., anyone who ran missions because they fit the civilian definition of a project, which is “any temporary endeavor undertaken to produce unique goods, services, outcomes, or capabilities”, land meaningful, lucrative post-military Service gigs doing project management.
But did you know that early on during the founding of Vets2PM, someone said to me “You can’t help every veteran”, and they were a retired veteran! I replied to their statement “Maybe not, but that doesn’t absolve me of my responsibility to try to make a difference to every one of them”.
So I keep picking one veteran at a time up, and tossing them into the meaningful, lucrative post-military service career sea.
Considering that in the 9 years since that exchange, my 2 organizations have helped over 13K veterans place into over 1K companies doing meaningful, lucrative work. One at a time. And research and anecdote alike demonstrate that having a meaningful, lucrative career keeps folks out of their own heads and in the make a difference to others game, which leads to better positive mental health outcomes.
Be one.
One helping me by joining our program as a veteran or one helping me by hiring those seasoned, certified, talented, experience veterans we have ready to go.
www.vets2pm.com/training and www.thevpmma.org
And because the tide recedes still, help me Corporate America: www.vets2pm.com/skillbridgeca
It’s a concept that I made up formed from two words, and it’s derived from a decade plus years helping 13K+ military veterans translate their experience into a language that Corporate America understands and get hired for those positions. “Provable Fluency” is the combination of three key things: experience
Everyone that holds a project management credential from the US-based Project Management Institute must earn Professional Development Units, i.e., “PDUs”, to maintain those certifications. You do not want to take these professional exams twice! PDUs are self-reported through one’s account at www.pmi.org, and PMI awards 1 PDU for every
In its most recent version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge, the seventh edition, the Project Management Institute defines a “project” as any “temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result” (2021). Temporary means that 1. a project has begin and end dates, 2. something is
