Hi, Kyle. My name is John, and I'm a serving military member that will be released medically over next year. My question to you is regarding career capital. And specifically, do you have any advice or tools that I could use to evaluate my career capital so I can transfer as much as I can when I transition to my civilian life?

Thank you very much. I get this question somewhat frequently from people who are nearing the end of their military career and thinking about the transition. And I usually have two points to make. The first point is what you're talking about here is the right thing to be talking about.

That is, thinking about assessing the career capital you have already built up in your current military position and being pretty accurate about that so you can target what jobs you go for. I think that makes a lot of sense. You want to avoid, if possible, starting over from a career capital position after you leave the military, saying, let me just go start with a completely unrelated job, because you probably have built up some valuable skills.

The right way to get that information is just look at who has gone before you. People with similar positions within the military who left in the last four or five years, where did they go? You've got to go out there and gather this intelligence from other people coming out of your same specialty, from your same rank, et cetera.

So for example, let's say you're in the Navy. Let's say you're a nuke and you're about to leave. And you might say, OK, where do nukes go after the Navy? And you see there's a couple options here that are pretty common. There's some government options. There's the NRC, maybe the NSAA.

There's some places that make sense. Then there's some industry options that might make sense, OK, you go work for the nuclear industry, et cetera. And maybe there's some consulting or sales options where they like that particular skill set. And then you have that information. Now you know these are positions that value what I do.

So gather that intelligence. The second point I make is it's often frustratingly difficult while you're still in the military to try to acquire new career capital in a self-directed manner. So I get questions about this a lot from people who are frustrated. They're in their last year or two of service.

And they're like, oh, I want to build up skills now. That's going to be very valuable when I leave. And they're stymied by the bureaucracy. They're stymied by the lack of flexibility. They're stymied by the fact that they are trying to build up cutting edge computer IT skills to get this job right out of the military.

But they're still using Commodore 64s for this particular Admiral scheduling system. And you have to put punch cards into the thing. And it's so out of date. And it's not relevant. That's just the reality often of very large bureaucracy. So that's my other piece of advice I give is do what you do in the military very well.

Whatever program you're in, do that program very well. Serve with distinction. Build up whatever skills are available. Match that to the extent possible by asking what other people have already done who have left in similar situations. But other than that, you have to maybe relax on thinking what's going to come next.

Once you leave the military and you have that next position, now you're going to have all that autonomy that you didn't have before. Now you're going to have that flexibility that you didn't have before to start asking the questions of, OK, what now do I want to learn? What's the path I want to navigate here?

What's the skill I could start learning now? So you sort of relax these last couple of years. Do your job well. Feel out the market. But once you're out of the military and have that job, now it's time to put the career capital foot back down on that accelerator.

Now it's time to start asking, what should I do now that I can do almost anything?