When Holly Mosack left the U.S. Army after nearly 8 years of service, she knew she needed a job, but she didn’t know what to do."  “It was really a feeling of I didn’t know what I was qualified for,” she said in a phone interview with Patch. Mosack, an Illinois native,  found a job in Ohio through an Army recruiter, but it wasn’t what she really wanted. “I didn’t care for it,” she said, “But like many service members I took the first job I got.” Less than a year later, Mosack moved back home, to Peoria, Il., and found a job with Advanced Technology Services (ATS). The company was looking to …

Patch put out the call to employers: Do you have jobs for returning veterans? And employers have been stepping forward. Here’s the latest. Margarita Noriega responded on behalf of AT&T to highlight the company’s involvement with the 100,000 Jobs Mission, an initiative launched in 2011 by several large companies to hire 100,000 veterans by 2020. “Military veterans are the leaders of tomorrow,” Noriega wrote in a statement, citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “but the unemployment rate for soldiers returning from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is vastly higher than the national average [12 …

Patch has begun telling some of the stories of the struggles of veterans facing fewer employment opportunities, and the successes, too. We want to do more. If you are a veteran and are looking for work, we invite you to contact us and answer the questions below, so we can put your job search information on our sites. 1. Name, rank, age, town, brief work/service history. Nicole McFarland, Chief (E7), Columbia.  I was a military photographer and video production specialist during my time in the Navy. I started my career as a command photographer for a P-3 Orion squadron documenting command …

In September 2008, two things happened: The world economy collapsed, and I was looking for a job. Since I was leaving the Navy, I used a “military career transition service,” which helps you with interview preparation, resume writing and culminates in a one-day/10-interview extravaganza. From those 10 initial interviews, I received nine “call-backs,” or second interviews; I turned down seven of them. This was not a smart decision. In retrospect, my standards were too high, my self-regard a bit … overly optimistic. I also had no plan beyond this one day of interviews. I figured with 10 …

When Andrew Smith III talked with his U.S. Marine Corps platoon mates in Iraq before he returned to Maryland in 2009, he recalled they agreed finding a job in a recession would be tough. But he said he never imagined it would be like this. Smith said he sleeps four hours a night to make time for his part-time job loading baggage for Delta Airlines, training classes in the afternoons and searching for a full-time job with benefits to support his wife and two kids without relying on food stamps and other assistance. But last week, during a job fair organized by the Maryland Department of …

Stephanie Gilbert of Pasadena served six years as an Arabic linguist and was an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan before being honorably discharged last year. The former staff sergeant is now pursuing a degree in financial economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. But when it came time for the 27-year-old veteran to seek financial services internships this summer, Gilbert was shocked when she was passed over. Twice. “I’m 27 years old and I’m applying for internships,” she said. “It’s disconcerting when a 19-year-old gets the internship instead of me. It’s like, ‘What…