Yesterday I mentioned an O-3 who requested a salary of $150k with no industry experience. Let’s dissect that.

First, $150k is a lot of money. Moving out of the military with only tactical experience and “leadership” as your skills makes that kind of leap very tough. 1/
It’s not impossible. But just like you should try to view military planning from the enemy perspective to spot weak points, you should try to view hiring from the firm’s perspective. It’s easy to see yourself as a gem on a coalface, but that’s not how you appear externally. 2/
As a junior/mid-grade Officer, you’re largely an undifferentiated commodity. Hiring managers have almost no way to know who’s the officer that senior leaders & NCOs turn to to make the magic happen, and who’s a lightly buffed turd that no one would rush to find if he vanished. 3/
We can thank evaluation inflation and the lip-service the military pays to accountability for that.

That opacity is why SOF and pilots do well in the job hunt, and why non-profits who cater to them have been successful in placing those folks in unique roles. 4/
You may find that unfair, but those credentials are a rough proxy for quality in the minds of managers who have little else to judge a candidate by. Like it or not, people know what “Pilot” and “Special Forces” means in one way or another. Infantry? Artillery? Not so much. 5/
Even so, experience really matters. Some industries are analogous with your military skill set. Most are not. You’ll have a lot to learn, and that is a cost & a risk to a manager. It’s not an insurmountable hurdle but it makes “increase my pay 25% over Uncle Sam” a stretch. 6/
Most importantly, you need to think about what your skill set looks like to a hiring manager. If they turned your resume over and asked you to tell them what you’re REALLY bringing to the table, what would/could you say? Too many folks think “Leadership” carries the mail. 7/
Leadership is both immensely valuable and yet it defies valuation and quantification...which makes it very hard to lean on as a skill. Moreover, leadership in the military is viewed as a much more rigid and authoritarian process than leadership in the private sector. 8/
Again, you can agree or disagree on whether that’s true, but the average manager thinks the military is much more “Colonel Jessup” than “startup.”

All this is to say that you need to temper your expectations of how much a manager will be champing at the bit over “leadership.” 9/
All that said, don’t get hung up on a number. $150k+ is rare, and isn’t the right metric anyway. The more important consideration is knowing how you want to work and where you can learn the most. Jobs where you learn lead to jobs where you earn. It’s gonna sting at first. 10/10
Oh and lot of you just learned that the etymologically correct term is “champing at the bit” and not the “chomping at the bit” derivation.

You’re welcome for my service.
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