Reinventing Selves: An Emerging Career Transition Model for Military Personnel

This practitioner-oriented piece explores concepts related to how active military personnel might begin to prepare for their impending career transition to mitigate some of the anticipated difficulties. To this end, the findings generated from a previous qualitative study and an emerging career transition model are connected to identified autonomy-supportive learning strategies that can be leveraged to assist US military personnel in navigating the major life and career change. The emerging framework is unique as it incorporates the experiences of military personnel in preparation for transition, in contrast to the many post-hoc, post-transition studies. This practice-focused article presents the identified concepts that support an emerging career transition model and autonomy-supportive learning strategies that may help pre-veterans better prepare for career transition. Some of the identified key concepts include: liminality, normalization, self-determination (autonomy, competency, relatedness), social capital, self-assessment, professional authoring, enactive mastery experiences, social brokerage, and comparing norms between systems. The connections made between research and practice may help military personnel, professional coaches, educators, and researchers better understand the experience of living “betwixt and between” which can inform the further development of pre-transition programming. Continued research is necessary to examine how various programs and initiatives can actively support veterans in “reinventing” their career paths.