Know Your Worth: Looking Beyond Entry-Level Positions
Jessica Reynolds, Military Recruitment Programs Manager at L3Harris, joins Jill New, our Career Programs and Outreach Manager, for a conversation about how veterans and Skillbridge applicants should be aiming their sights a little higher than entry-level positions. Jessica is considered to be a leading expert in the business sector for military recruitment.
Jill sits down with Jessica Reynolds from L3Harris and chats about knowing your worth and looking beyond entry-level positions. Here's the bottom line:
When you're looking for a new career or a new position, it's vital to build your network. You can find people like Jessica and Jill on LinkedIn -- and you can also connect with other recruiters and hiring managers here. Start networking
When discussing your experiences -- particularly the ones that will help you qualify for something beyond entry-level -- focus on transferrable skills and all of your past experiences. Consider listing your experiences, both paid and volunteer, in months so that the time adds up to the required number of years. Think about your transferrable skills and make sure to highlight those skills through the lens of what you can do, not what you have done.
Watch the replay below!
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Know your Worth
Jill New: Hi. Good morning. Good afternoon. Wherever you are. My name is Jill New and I'm the Career Program and Outreach Manager. And today we're going to be talking with Jessica Reynolds from L3Harris about knowing your worth and knowing that you're capable of looking beyond entry-level positions.
I know that some of you are joining us in a variety of ways. So thank you for coming and seeing us today, Jessica, I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you're doing at L3Harris.
Jessica Reynolds: Hi yeah, I am the Military Veteran and SkillBridge Program Hiring Manager for L3Harris. So I help veterans and active duty service members after transition and during transition, get into L3Harris into a variety of roles spanning most of our geographic locations and job functions. I'm looking forward to helping answer any questions that you have about navigating the job market even if you're a career switcher, how your education plus your military career kind of equates to more than just entry-level
Jill New: Talking about career pivoters cause I feel like that's a great way to describe veterans, especially student veterans, is that maybe there are MOS in your background is not something that you're trying to do once you've transitioned out of active duty. And maybe your imposter syndrome could be showing a little bit when you're looking for jobs.
So what types of ways do you recommend a candidate look at positions at L3Harris in terms of how it's going to meet their skillset moving forward, while they're a student and while they're looking for this post-graduation job?
Jessica Reynolds: One of the big things to do is to really start to network. That's one thing that I will always push to people is to, grow your network or your professional network, even in school, on LinkedIn. And start to talk to people and it really helps you to align your degree if you've got more of a specialized degree, say in finance or accounting that's an easy alignment.
If you're going into engineering, it's a little different, but if you like, I have a business degree. I went to college and got the standard bachelor's of business administration and that's a broad stroke that can go a lot of ways. So then you also look at, what do you want to do? And how can you show your skills through the lens of what you want to do versus what you know how to do?
I would say a focus on transferable skills would be key in that when you're networking and describing yourself and creating kind of your personal brand is highlighting those transferable skills that come from anywhere, come from your service, come from your academic background.
And putting those together is going to be how you pinpoint and how you hone in on maybe a specific type of position.
There are so many transferable skills coming out of the military. One of the ones that they focus on the most is trainability and adaptability. So now you're taking the ability to learn. The military teaches you to do so many different jobs and that doesn't lead you when you leave the service.
And so coming from that military hiring perspective, that's one of the things that many of our managers see is they're bringing somebody in who is dependable, who is trainable. So now you just have to find what is it that they're asking me to do and where did I do it in the military? 'Cause I promise you most of the things they're asking you to do, you've done in the military with a few small exceptions that I can think of.
Jill New: What do you think if you were if we're talking to a candidate to a student, who's looking at positions with L3Harris, what does L3Harris consider an entry-level position?
Jessica Reynolds: So for us, entry-level, it's pretty easy to tell because, under our education requirements, it'll just say degree and zero to two years experience.
And if you're okay with that, that's fine. But you might not necessarily need to start there. Anything building after that is no longer considered entry-level. And once you start to build on that, we'll take finance for example I was just working on some finance stuff, so it's fresh in my brain.
So you would think, okay, I have a bachelor's in accounting. So, I would have to take an entry-level accounting job, but then we start looking at some of the qualifications where they want you to have so many years experience in this, so many years experience and cost accounting and earned value management.
And it's not all of those things are done in the military, but you're not an entry-level candidate with work experience. And you have work experience. I'm guessing at least a minimum of four years, it just might not be in accounting and it doesn't necessarily have to be in accounting to count.
And so then you start to look at it. Okay, well I did four years as, we'll say, an admin type. I'm a Navy spouse, so we call them Yeoman. I don't know what anybody else calls them. But so now you've done the administrative work, Excel, potentially to Tableau, pivot tables, things of that nature. So you've got the bits and pieces that add up to the whole picture.
Jill New: And that's why I always recommend initially is when you're writing resumes is that you put the time that you've had an experience in months, because of you're adding six months here, six months there, six months here, six months there, you're adding one, two years of experience. Especially if we're, if you're counting things in your academic terms, a spring semester is about three, four months. And then you have three, four months again. So if you're adding, you have a class experience, so if your world we'll stick with your accounting. So in accounting curriculums, there are often times you're doing tax prep projects and things like that. You can count those in your resume.
You can explain those in your resume as experiences, even though they're not paid. And then you can count that time. So if you've done that. In two or three classes over three, two or three semesters, you're easily at that one to two years of experience. And that's just your academic time to count.
Jessica Reynolds: Maybe you volunteered in the military. Maybe you were the MWR treasurer for your command and you had to handle cash and inflow for pizza sales, bake sales, merch sales, like the t-shirts and I've got a thousand command t-shirts, and you've got to track those sales and that revenue, that income. How much did we pay the vendor that's experience? Work experience, but it's experience.
Jill New: I always say that as well. Employers don't care, if you've got paid for your experience, they care that you have the experience. So counting that experience makes you not necessarily an entry-level. So then you can look at those other positions, which for a three Harris are going to be indicated as three to five years experience as much.
Jessica Reynolds: So mid-level starts really after probably about three years at three-year experience. Now we're talking about, coming in as a senior associate specialist. And specialist is really a term that I found really resonates in the military community because so many of the branches use "specialist" in their rankings.
And L3Harris has modeled a lot of their staffing after what the military kind of looks like because we are so veteran-heavy and we are military adjacent.
Jill New: Great. So there's, we do have a question. Connor, thanks for asking Connor asks. Are there programs at L3Harris or other places to help veterans find what they're worth are valued at? The concept of not needing to apply to entry-level positions, but what does, what is my experience worth and how can I find that worth? Those are great questions because when you're on active duty, are you talking about, I'm assuming you're talking about pay? Not just titling, but In the military, your pay grades, how you rank up, how you advance is really codified and in civilian jobs, that's not necessarily the case. So, some companies are going to have something kind of codified, but not necessarily. So Jessica I'll let you talk about what L3Harris does in terms of knowing what's your value and what you're worth.
Jessica Reynolds: Do your homework first Glassdoor, Salary.com. LinkedIn, Indeed. Look at the salary bands for what you want to do, not necessarily what you think you're qualified to do, but what is it you want to do? And you can filter these down by years of experience and kind of create a median and then base that around what you need to make to survive.
When I talk to people all the time, I'm like, listen, like we do what we do because we love what we do, but we also like to pay our bills and we don't like to. And so I come to the table with a number. I don't know if you can live. $1,800 a month, or if you need $15,000 a month, it really just depends on where you are and what you need. So I would really recommend knowing some basic market data for where you live and what you want to do.
Because I could offer you say a level three accounting job in the Bay Area, or I could offer you a little dirty accounting job in Norfolk. Those are going to be wildly two different numbers, like wholeheartedly two completely different numbers, because it is way cheaper to live in Norfolk than it is Galena.
By the way, I'm hiring in Galena. And so it's a lot cheaper. So we're obviously going to pay you more for the same job over here. We would over here. So knowing what your worth is going to be really subjective to a lot of external factors that have absolutely nothing to do with the company.
Jill New: Right. And I'm glad you talked about Glassdoor and Salary.com, and Indeed, these are all places to find this type of data about salaries, about benefits. So that's another way of counting your compensation. So that's not necessarily how you count compensation when you're active duty, but in terms of unlimited paid time off, healthcare benefits, if you need them for yourself or maybe your family. If you're not coming out after 20 years with retirement, you need to pay attention to the retirement benefits in your, in these compensation plans as well, because you'll spend a lot of time working and then a lot of time not working that needs that you still need to fund.
And then I also, how can you think about work-life balance and other things that you value as well. So, those things also are important for you to pay attention to when you're reading job descriptions and being able to value yourself and what you're worth. And then it's also like Jessica said, and Indeed a lot of the Indeed jobs, even if the employer doesn't post the pay range, indeed does some fact-checking and have an algorithm about what they estimate it would be at. And it does vary geographically as well. I suggest if you have any kind of experience to definitely look beyond those zero to two years and match those skills.
So thinking about your collateral duties while you were active, are going to be, are going to be key Jessica talked about, where you the MWR treasurer. Yeah. Those are the people that I ran across those people as Did you have to plan, do any of the planning and things like that with your units on deployments, things like that, those are all collateral duties that are going to end up being really transferable, and they may be actually more transferable than what your MOS was.
Jessica Reynolds: So coming out with a military background and a college degree. So now you're looking at a ton of opportunities. I talk a lot about finance. There's a big push for finance in the Bay Area. if anybody out there is working on a finance degree, engineering... There are, gosh, we have all flavors of engineering from electrical mechanical manufacturing quality. Software cyber cybersecurity, but we have cybersecurity needs.
We have program manager needs. Anybody who follows me on LinkedIn, we'll learn why those are my two favorite words in the English language together. Um, We have everything from operations to supply chain too, you name it. We'd probably do it. Research and development, and I only represent a small corner of L3Harris when you look at it from a global perspective. So we are a 40,000 person strong company, and we span 300 geographic 300 office sites over 30 countries. So we are huge and I only represent one little corner, but I know a lot of people across the organization and we've created a bridge, like a little talent bridge.
And Anthony processing timing for internships. Are you talking about college interns, like summer internships? So I don't work in university recruiting, but if you connect with me on LinkedIn, I can get you to the people who handle those. I only work with skill bridge interns when it comes to internships and then I'm the veteran hiring liaison.
Jill New: There are those types of internships available if you're an undergrad or graduate student? Correct?
Jessica Reynolds: We do all three-semester internships. We do co-ops. We have all of that. I don't do the university recruiting piece, that's a completely different team which is pretty common in the recruiting world. However, coming from the military, unless you are completely switching careers sometimes the internships are a little beneath your skillset. Especially like if you're staying kind of close to what you did in the military, you may find them to be a little redundant and you may not need that internship to show experience to gain mid-level career employment post-graduation
Jill New: Okay. That's good to know. Because you might think you might be thinking you're a student and being a student mindset in terms of internships, and really you don't, you may not need that. But that's good to go to pinpoint that if you're really stretching from, I always talk about the culinary specialist to accounting or to data, it may be very divergent, you may need that extra experience.
Jessica Reynolds: I usually use software engineering as my case. That's the push these days is software engineering. If you were a yeoman and you want to be an engineer, you might need an internship, but if you were in supply and you want to get into the corporate supply chain and you've got a supply chain degree or a logistics degree, you don't need an internship.
That's an easy transition straight into a low-level management role, depending on how long you served.
Jill New: That's good to know. What about if you're coming out with a technical background, but your degree is more business and product, and you're focused a lot more on project management.
Jessica Reynolds: It depends on what you want to do.
Obviously, with a degree in project management, you want to manage projects. But a lot of companies are hiring those from within. So maybe you take a technical supervisor role, show your worth. It's kind of like in the military like you gotta earn that next step. And so a lot of companies are very hesitant to hire with high levels of pass /fail. That project manager, that program manager holds a lot of responsibility, especially on the fiduciary side. That project, if it runs overtime, over budget, that cost that can cost a company like L3Harris a lot of money.
So we are usually hesitant to hire from without, from outside for those roles. But we love to promote the people that work for us into those roles because that level of trust is there.
Jill New: And if you are interested in those types of roles, make sure you're highlighting that monetary figure on your resume in your bullet points that you've saved, you saved this much money. You were running a project that costs this much money. If you were working with civilian contractors for an overhaul of your ship, and then the overhaul was worth a million, 1.2 million billion, depending on what type of ship you were on, dollars, make sure you're putting those types of figures in your resume.
Any other questions that we have?
Jessica Reynolds: And Robert, I would push back on your internship with a firefighter paramedic depending on what you're going into. I've known a lot of first responders just in my general life. And most of what they do is easily transferable. It's all about the lens in which you spin it. I found some talks on programming, project management, and I took a resume from somebody who was this, an assistant manager at a McDonald's and turn their resume into a program into a food project manager resume.
It's all about how. How you angle your lens, for anybody who likes photography, changing the angle of your lens can change the entire story.
Jill New: That's true. There are some other good questions here. For data analytics types of technical positions what types of roles are there with L3Harris with the analytics background?
Jessica Reynolds: Um, So analytics is, it's another one of that kind of broadly applied. Could you go into operations management, quality, you could go into earned value management. We have a position that we actually Skillbridged an Army officer into, and it was BD operations. And basically, he goes in and takes all the data from the BD groups and puts it in spreadsheets and tells the story through data.
That's the whole tenant of data analytics is to compile the data. And tell somebody like me who doesn't know what it looks like. "Sure. That's great. That's great. That's a great pivot table." I don't know what it says. Pretty colors. Being able to tell that story that is an infinitely niche role that is well in need in many organizations.
Jill New: Let's see, another question is I have a degree in finance and accounting, but trying to switch to cyber security. And I worked with supply for five years. What would be your advice? And I'm sure there's plenty open for you. Yes, but what's the advice?
Jessica Reynolds: So honestly, I can give you a job in finance and accounting yesterday.
Finance and accounting, it's not the hot button that cybersecurity is right now. Um, But if you're getting into a defense organization, the pay isn't going to be that far off. You get into something like program finance, and a level three can come in at a hundred thousand dollars a year easily, and that's a middle of the road, like a mid-level position for us, a level three comes in a hundred thousand dollars, remote, telling people about their numbers. And coming in at cybersecurity with a degree I'm with a background in supply and finance, you're gonna, you're going to have to show those transferrable skills. You're going to have to show how you worked on cyber initiatives from the lens of your other experience to help make up some of that gap.
Career switching is probably one of my favorite things to do in the world. Cause I've done it like four times. And you come in and you just want to make sure that you're showing it, how did you work with cybersecurity? How did tie it in? It's in there. It's just trying to find that little lens.
So when you worked in supply and, let's see, so supply and cybersecurity. So, you helped stand up a new ERP system and helped create some of the best practices like SOPs for security on the network. You did it while working in supply because you are integrating that new program and now you've integrated it. And here's how we help beef up the security through SOPs.
Jill New: That's great. It's just about thinking about what you've done before and how that applies. So, there was a reason you got interested in cybersecurity. Maybe it was just because it's a hot field right now, but there's a reason. And maybe you had an experience in your former working life that raised that flag of interest and you can talk about if you put that in the resume and you talk about that in your elevator pitches about how did I get interested in that? I had a cyber security student who said the reason I'm in cybersecurity is that my parents were hacked and lost a lot of money. And that's a key component to her interest in and entry into cyber. So maybe that's what happened when you were in finance and accounting, maybe something happened along those lines and you worked for somewhere that they had to pay that fee because everybody was locked out and then that just made you go, "Ooh, I don't ever want to work in an environment where that's happening again."
So we do still have a few more questions, rolling in, which is great. I encourage your questions. What positions would an MBA translate to in the civilian sector? So MBA is broad and you can be in anything, but what types of positions, Jessica, do you think are that you have, that are available, that is asking for something like that, an MBA
Jessica Reynolds: So an MBA level positions. Now we're looking at corporate business development in before anybody turns their nose up because it said the words, business development. Business development in the civilian sector is not the same as the kid at the mall, trying to get you to switch your cell phone plan.
It's not the same thing while they may both be called business development. Business development in the defense sector is about relationship building, especially with 20 years in the military. You know a ton of people, a ton of people who know a ton of people who want to use L3Harris products. You want to use our Green Side Radios, our NODs, our Lasers, our cybersecurity equipment, and our cryptology equipment, our autonomous vehicles. And it's all about making those connections. I worked heavily with our business development team. And you would never think any of them are sales. I've got retired admirals, O-6s, Seals. And no. But you have taken an MBA in finance.
I've got a hiring manager in Galena, California, who would love somebody to come in with an MBA. He doesn't even care what your bachelor's is in, or if you have any finance experience, if you have an MBA, it's good enough. And that comes in at a three to five-year experience level right off the bat.
And MBA, you can also go to HR. I have an MBA recruiter. Really just depends on what you want. It depends on what you want to do. It's not always about what does it translate to, but what makes you want to get out of bed in the morning and not hate your life? Because job satisfaction is a big deal and can be just as important as how much money is in your check at the end of the week.
Jill New: And we see that you see that now with people resigning, the Great Resignation. People are really paying attention to job satisfaction as well as they are paying attention to compensation.
Jessica Reynolds: A few more questions. Let's see, Anthony, mentorship is my favorite thing.
I wasn't sure what I was allowed to plug here, but L3Harris is a participating member with American Corporate Partners. This is, all of you are veterans, all of you are eligible to participate in American Corporate Partners, which pairs you with a one-year mentor in your work field. And it's a one-year mentorship to help you really understand where you are and how to get where you want to be.
Because these people, while they may not be veterans, they're leaders in their field, and they can help you know where you need to, like what steps you need to take to get there. And L3Harris is a participating partner with American Corporate Partners, so a lot of our employees are in there.
Jill New: I have an ACP mentor.
Jessica Reynolds: I just finished. My one-year mentorship just wrapped up. And it's amazing it's eyeopening, and it helps you to really understand what you need to cultivate the career that they have. They can tell you the steps that they took, they can look at where you are and help guide you to where you want to be.
Just know it is a one-year commitment. If maybe you're not sure if you have enough bandwidth for that Veterati, that our is another great free mentorship. LinkedIn. Type in that type of job you want, and you can filter by previous military service and just start sending people messages. "Hey, I'm a veteran I'm interested in the job that you have.
Would you be willing to have a 15-minute conversation with me?" And just talk to them. See how they did it. See if they like it. Because I get a lot of people "I want to be a program manager. I want to be an operations manager" and then they get that job. And then it's this is nothing that I thought it was going to be and I hate it.
So talk to them, see if they like what they do. Because again, I will say this until I'm blue in the face. Liking your job is very important. You can be very well paid, like six-plus figures and hate your job and still be miserable.
Jill New: To go back to talking about enjoying your job and finding mentors, you can also sort by the school and you can check out alumni as well.
And that might be a good outlet for you as well to say "Hi, we also, we went to school together, not necessarily the same time, but I see you went to school here and I went to school there. Are you open to a 15-minute conversation about your career path and in your career pivots?"
So, paying attention to those types of opportunities, not just active duty or veteran status, but also where you'd went to school.
Richard asks. Are there opportunities for part-time, remote internships for full-time career professionals who are also grad students such as training development, human resource interns to gain experience? And that some of us have the education or military experience, but lack the civilian equivalent experience.
Jessica Reynolds: Um, So, I am going to be growing my team in the next few months and I will be taking on one college intern in Skillbridge intern. So they're coming with L3Harris right now. We don't do a lot of part-time work. It's just, it doesn't fit our model. If you are looking for a standard college internship, that is something you could speak with one of the recruiters about. All of our college internships are posted on our career site.
Jill New: Do you happen to know what the time, what those recruiting cycles are for those internships? Or is it posted on that site and I can find it there?
Jessica Reynolds: I believe they are wrapping into the interviews for summer interns now. And then mid-summer, they will start fall co-op and then mid-fall winter co-op and then into summer. I believe our co-ops are a little easier to get on part-time than our summer internships, just because they expect you're still taking classes in the summer or in the fall and the winter versus the summer.
Jill New: Great. I want to thank Jessica Reynolds from L3Harris for joining us today. She's my friend from Virginia. I'm really excited that you were able to join me here today. Feel free to reach out to any of us at the dealer center as well, to get connected with additional opportunities. We will have our having some more career-related information sessions coming, moving forward. So be on the lookout for that in our newsletter, in our Facebook group and across coming through your email accounts and we'll look forward to connecting with you there as well for more information about careers. Thanks so much, everyone.
