Top "8 Things" Tip #2: If Location is Important, Work For It

This topic is near and dear to my heart, since I've spent a signficant amount of time in my career attempting to solve for my location preference. After West Point, my first duty station was Ft. Lewis outside Tacoma, WA.  During my 3 1/2 years at Lewis, I fell in love with the Northwest....literally.  Of course the landscape here is beautiful, but I also met and married my wife. (She grew up in Western Washington and was attending the University of Washington at the time.)  Ultimately the Army took us other places, but we always had a preference to settle down in the Northwest to raise a family. It's taken a lot of hard work and some tough decisions to finally get back to the Seattle area, but it was important to us; Here is my advice on for location.

Determine how important living where YOU want to live is to you (and your family). Is it something that you need to solve for now or can you be happy just working toward a particular location over the course of your career...OR...do you not care at all? If you don't care at all, that is great....you will certainly give yourself more opportunity for employment having true geographical flexbility...and the JMO recruiters will love you(we'll talk about them in my next post); however, if you do truly have a location preference, plan on working harder and taking more time to find a job that will take you to your preferred location.  Most JMO recruiters will "coach" you to tell all employers that you are geographically flexible, because they want you to get the most exposure possible to all possible job opportunities. (This also gives them a better chance of placing you in a job...and getting paid.)

Only you can determine how important location is for you and your family. There are 2 specific actions I recommend if you are focused on a particular geography:

1) Network, network, network. This topic will be covered more in a future post because of its importance,  but there are plenty of tools on the internet that allow you to track down people living and working in the geography you likely prefer. The ISABRD and AOG sites for academy graduates), or LinkedIn, University Alumni associations are good places to start looking for someone to reach out to. Often many of you may know people in locations where you want to live....don't hesitate to drop an e-mail. Additionally, depending on where you want to live, there are sometimes career conferences and recruiters in many of these regions, and I encourage you to attend these events and connect with these organizations. It can never hurt to establish some direct contacts with people in the area you are looking to settle. There are plenty of veterans out there looking to help other veterans, so don't be shy...but always be respectful.

2) Go back to school in the area you want to settle down in. Find a school in the area you want to live and go back to school full-time for a graduate degree (MBA, Engineering, Leadership).  Of course, you will need to determine what type of program you are interested in, but you have already started to assess your interests, which is a good place to start. Going to school will give you more time to figure out exactly what you want to do, and will give you great access to internship and networking opportunities through the university's career office. If I would've figured this out when I was leaving the Army, I would've been in Seattle a long time ago...guaranteed.  Full-time school may not seem like the easiest decision, but for the most part you will likely never be more detached from large financial obligations than you are when first leaving the military. I will discuss this more in another post, but trust me, if you can swing it financially, do it!