Land of Lincoln Goodwill Industries will be holding a pair of meetings to introduce veterans to the Vetlink program. Vetlink is designed to support veterans’ employment needs including updating job skills, learning computer job searching techniques, improving interview techniques, and improving writing skills.
Tiffany Van Meter, Career Coach for Land of Lincoln Goodwill Industries’ Jacksonville office, says the Vetlink program also links veterans up with other services designed for veterans.
“The Vetlink program is designed to help veterans who wish to return to the workforce or update their career skills. We help vets look for work, we help them with resumes, fill out applications. Another important component to the Vetlink Program is helping them find the resources they need, hence the name Vetlink. We help them connect to other veterans programs they may not know about, to help them with all their needs.”
Van Meter says that all the Career Coaches receive special training to learn how to work specifically with veterans.
“A veterans resume is quite a bit different than just scratching out anybody’s resume because we really learn how to take what they learned in the military and apply it to within the civilian world. A lot of veterans will return, and you ask them what their specific skills are and they will just say I was responsible for transporting this equipment. It is billions of dollars worth of equipment, but they don’t know how to translate that into a resume.”
Van Meter explains why this new program was created to help veterans.
“We have so many veterans coming back from serving and they really need that help returning to civilian life. They are facing a lot of barriers that everyday people just aren’t facing and don’t understand.”
The Vetlink orientation meetings will be held at 6 pm on March 8th and at 10 am March 9th at the Jacksonville Goodwill located at 1809 West Morton.