Forces Network, a professional network of the military veterans in corporate, conducted a full day Military to Corporate (M2C) Transition Workshop at Holiday Inn, Aerocity, New Delhi on 20 October 2019.
GR Reddy the Founder of Husys, India’s first publicly listed HR company, gave a wonderful talk on the ‘opportunities for veterans in the MSME sector.’ He had flown in from Hyderabad especially for this session. In a post event interaction he said that he was pleasantly surprised to such an energetic and positive community and looked forward to an enduring association with them.
Forces Network is an online community of military veteran officers in the corporate which today has grown into a vibrant global community with more than 5000 members worldwide. The Network was founded in 2007. This 11 years old network, with members spread across the globe, firmly believes that veterans have much more to offer to the industry and the society than what the current opportunities being made available to them. There is a reorientation required for the military personnel before they can rejoin the civilian workforce.
–Col Iqbal Singh (Retd)
Founder Forces Network
CV Writing is felt to be the weakest link in the job hunt process for the veterans, and therefore, there was a great amount of stress laid on CV writing in this workshop. With their past experience and learning Forces Network trainers have reduced this activity to a system based on a framework created by them. Not only was the framework shared with the participants but the CV makeover of several participants was demonstrated in the workshop. Nearly two hours were devoted to this activity with the participants made to recreate their CV from scratch using the framework duly assisted by the trainers.
In addition, a live mock interview was conducted in front of the participants. The interview panellists, who were practising industry professionals and veterans, shared their feedback which was found to be extremely insightful and valuable by the attendees. Salary negotiation aspects were also covered in detail by an HR professional. Mindset resetting is also an important part of the M2C transition. With that in view a session was devoted to this aspect wherein a clinical Psychologist Sqn Ldr Meena Arora (Retd) conducted a few Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) exercises – which were very well received.
The seminar was attended by close to 100 people. The participants were excited after the workshop. They felt empowered and more confident, and expressed optimism towards their second career in the civil. Most past participants have reported accelerated learning as well as faster realization of their aspirational goals.
The workshop concluded with an hourlong mentoring session where selected trainers mentored the mentees in small groups of 4-6 people on a round table. They encouraged the mentees to ask any questions. The mentees found the session to be extremely helpful and cleared a lot of ‘cobwebs’ from their minds.
