I recently visited Launch Consulting, a technology staffing and project management firm based in Bellevue. They have been running Programs for Accelerated Veteran Employment (PAVE) for active military personnel who hope to enter the IT profession. We interviewed two cohorts of students – expert soldiers from Signal Intel, Marine Engineering, Logistics, and many other professional backgrounds. In four months, working full time during their transition period from military service to civilian life, these tenacious men and women developed programming skills, built applications, and served as interns.

Thanks to PAVE, each of these former soldiers is now employed full time.

Their stories are inspiring. The communication tools required to work on a team applies equally well in a war zone as it does in a tiger team building an app. One of my favorite was of a cook who served in Afghanistan. As a cook in the Army, he had to also serve as procurement officer, project manager, constantly adapting to changing conditions. His resume would have been overlooked as “cook” but the team at Launch helped him craft a better description of his experience. He entered PAVE and thanks to the resilience developed in Afghanistan, he now builds apps.

Few of the vets in PAVE have any prior experience or training to write code, but all of them developed strong skills to get hired in under four months. How? They worked full time learning in class and working on projects. In their spare time, they collaborated on improving their skills. In short – they had the intellectual capacity, the drive, and the determination to learn. And they did – quickly. These vets kick butt!

You can learn more about this amazing program at http://launchcg.com/pave