Authors: Rosalinda Maury | Deborah Bradbard

 

PROBLEM

Most employment efforts focus on recruiting and hiring military spouse employees, but retaining them is often a more challenging goal for employers. For one, most employers adopt existing veteran hiring strategies and apply them to military spouse initiatives. Using these strategies has the advantage of providing an existing framework, and yet has minimized the impact of relocation on military spouse retention. For these and other reasons,
unemployment and underemployment continue to remain high for military spouses which raises some key questions:

1. Can improving or increasing the options for military spouse career portability positively impact the unemployment and
   underemployment situation for military spouses?
2. What are the issues that impact career portability and how can employers retain their military spouse employees when they relocate?

CURRENT RESEARCH EFFORTS

The current research effort will explore how relocation impacts military spouses and begin to identify policies, procedures, and practices employers can adopt to enable job portability solutions. We will collect information from both military spouses and employers on career portability and related information.

The goals of this project are to:

1. provide a definition of career portability,
2. identify the range of portability challenges encountered by both employers and military spouses, and
3. to develop resources, guidelines, and frameworks that inform and assist employers, policy makers, and military spouses in
   creating portable career pathways.

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