'A Difficult Road': Veterans Face Obstacles In Pursuit Of CRE Careers

When Kenika Ng decided to leave the Air Force in 2018 after a 20-year career, he figured he was exactly the kind of veteran commercial real estate firms would be eager to hire. 

By that point, Ng led a 20-person engineering team at California’s Travis Air Force Base that managed and maintained buildings and infrastructure. He was in charge of keeping 410 facilities and $4.2B worth of infrastructure in working order. He trained 248 facility managers each year. With this kind of experience, responsibility and transferable skills, companies across CRE would surely be jumping to bring him on board. Or so he thought. 

Instead, it would take Ng applying to more than 120 jobs and recruitment programs to land just five interviews and a pair of job offers.

Now JLL’s director of talent acquisition in charge of bringing veterans into the CRE giant’s ranks, Ng said his experience was a rude awakening to the enormous challenges that even the most qualified veterans face when attempting to transition into a civilian CRE workforce that often struggles to identify military talent.

“What they don't tell us in the military is that ‘we don't talk the same as the civilian workforce does, so everything that we're teaching you, you have to be able to translate that,’” Ng said.

“Regardless of the fact that I was handling over 40 different individuals at any given point in time, had multimillion-dollar installations underneath me and was helping to manage billions in infrastructure … well, unless you know exactly how to translate that so that everybody can understand exactly what it is that you do, it's a difficult road.” 

Each year, about 200,000 members of the U.S. military, stationed in over 140 military installations worldwide, leave active duty and re-enter the civilian workforce or attend a college or university.

Companies across all sectors of commercial real estate profess eagerness to hire veterans, but the reality is service members face an uphill climb into the industry. 

While some of this rests on employers’ inability to identify relevant skills and experience obtained through military service, most veterans do face a very real skills and experience gap compared with other candidates for the same roles. 

And once hired, veterans face additional challenges integrating into the civilian workforce, beginning with the soft skills of communicating with co-workers or formulating an understanding of another person’s experiences. Recent headlines about conflicts in the Middle East or Ukraine and the dispatching of U.S. troops for support purposes, for example, can trigger a vastly different response for a veteran than someone who hasn’t served.

“There's a lot of stuff going on in the Middle East right now. And everybody might be talking about something they’ve seen on the news,” said Brian Green, executive vice president for strategic data center infrastructure at EdgeConneX and a former Navy officer. “And you might have a veteran that served over there, where that might trigger previous memories or they might know people that are over there and know what it's like. And they might get really quiet because it brings up painful memories.”

Many veterans report having difficulty adjusting to the lack of structure in the workplace outside the military, where authority is less clear and priorities can be blurrier. Even understanding the boundaries of professional relationships can be difficult coming from a radically team-oriented environment where you eat, sleep and spend all your free time with your co-workers. 

For more experienced veterans who take on higher-level roles at CRE companies, the change in leadership styles can be especially jarring.

Army Col. Chris Albus retired from the military in 2020 after a 34-year career and started a job at Lendlease as project director for a military housing development. He learned quickly that he was going to have to change the leadership style that had served him well over his three-decade career.  

“Working with soldiers in the Army is vastly different than working with civilians in a private company,” he said. “I learned to be nuanced and softer and that I had to get real buy-in from the civilian workforce, unlike the soldiers where you can just tell them to do something and they’ll do it.” 

There are programs through the U.S. government and at individual companies to help veterans make the transition.

The Department of Defense in 2011 launched its SkillBridge program to assist U.S. military personnel returning to civilian life following the Global Financial Crisis. The program provides service members near the end of their enlistment a chance to gain civilian work experience through industry training, apprenticeships or internships.

“SkillBridge allows you to transition a little early,” said former Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Lindsay Johnson, now an associate recruiter at Cushman & Wakefield. She matched with Cushman & Wakefield repeatedly as part of the program, and the company eventually made her an offer.

Johnson said her time with Cushman & Wakefield has eased the transition out of the service by exposing her to the environment and expectations of a civilian organization. Cushman has hired 100 veterans in the last four years through the program and has hired 2,200 veterans overall in that timeframe. Worldwide, Cushman employs 52,000 people.

CRE companies are also building out programs aimed not at recruiting, but at mentoring. 

Mentorship can make a big difference for a veteran making the transition to a civilian workplace, Lendlease’s Albus said.

These programs go beyond simply helping avoid career pitfalls to have a mental health component as well, said Derek Grego, director at Vitrian, a Washington, D.C.-based subsidiary of GlenLine Investments.

Veterans are navigating an unfamiliar career landscape while simultaneously moving from an intensely team-oriented environment to a workplace where few have shared their experience. For those with traumatic experiences from service, these initiatives can provide a structure and access to resources that are not as readily available as when they were in the military. 

But even with plenty of support, skills gaps are real, and they take resources, and often concentrated effort, to overcome.

“Our pipeline is generally pretty good when it comes to veterans transitioning out,” Turner Construction Director of Talent Acquisition Josh Rhoades said. “I think the challenge is when you're bringing somebody on board, how do you integrate somebody into the company who doesn't have construction experience, in our case?” 

For instance, Rhoades said, a veteran with 20 years of experience in something like supply chains or safety compliance can be a good fit for a company like Turner. But when compared to a civilian candidate with the same years of experience coming over from a competitor, companies either have to choose the person with the more easily transferable skills, or prepare to invest in training.

“You have some skills and knowledge and abilities that you're looking for from somebody working for our competitor or somebody out in the industry,” Rhoades said. “It's more challenging to bring in someone who's a veteran who doesn't have the construction experience. And again, that's why we're building a veteran onboarding program that really addresses those things.”

Like Cushman, Turner works with the SkillBridge program and is investing in veteran-focused training and skill development.

Large businesses like Turner have the resources to spend on such programs, but smaller companies often don’t have the same capability.

“You get out and you get the lip service about being committed to hiring veterans, but when the rubber meets the road you still are expected to perform in a job,” said Vitrian’s Grego, who was an Army infantry officer before coming to commercial real estate. 

“I think a lot of the major firms that have the capacity and have the infrastructure to recruit and train veterans that it's a great commitment and they can do that,” Grego said. “But I'm seeing it now in a much smaller entrepreneurial company and we probably don't have the resources to sit down and do dedicated training for new hires for hours every day.” 

But for those companies that can recruit and successfully integrate veterans, the skills they bring can be invaluable.

“The Marine Corps is certainly a cauldron for leadership development,” said CBRE Chief Investment Officer Croft Young, who served in the Marine Corps for 13 years, completing two combat tours in Iraq between 2004 and 2006 and rising to the rank of major. “The experiences I've had in building teams and mentoring people developing talent really is rooted in my experience in the Marine Corps.”

Still, Young wonders if commercial real estate could improve its support of veterans like him.

“Could [the industry] do more?” Young said. “Probably, but I don't know. There's a lot of ways that you can pursue talent acquisition.”