Top 5 High-Paying Jobs for Veterans

David Yoo, RallyPoint Civilian Careers.

#1 Management Consultant

Organizations seek management consultants (also known as business consultants) for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons include requesting advice for current business practices and to understand the market in which the company operates by seeking business consultants' expertise. 

Those who have served are well aware of the importance of being efficient and effective. Management consulting is the practice of aiding companies, businesses, and organizations in helping improve their operations. 

Veterans and service members are well positioned to demonstrate their strengths, especially when it involves improving the business' efficiency and overseeing important operations. Consultants also analyze problems that afflict organizations in their structure and management and develop strategies to ensure those problems do not the companies' long term development. As Norbert Lucca notes, business consultants may also "provide organizational change management assistance, development of coaching skills, process analysis, technology implementation, strategy development, or operational improvement services."

Lucca continues by explaining that management consultants often bring their own methods or frameworks to guide the identification of problems and to "serve as the basis for recommendations for more effective or efficient ways of performing work tasks." Deloitte and KPMG are two consulting firms that have expressed their great interest in tapping into the veteran population to create a more robust and diverse workforce.

The median annual salary of a management consultant is $85,934.

#2 Business Development Manager

Business development is comprised of a number of different projects, tasks, and operations that intend to bolster a business' growth and development. Business development managers and business development heads can be tasked with a range of missions and projects including information technology, strategic marketing, as well as sales and relations development.

Scott Pollack from Forbes expressed his view on what business development means: "While Business Development may still mean many different things to many different people, at it’s core I believe a Biz Dev job is focused on 3 activities: 

-Customers: Find new ones and extract more value from current ones. 

-Markets: Figure out where new customers 'live' (both geographically and in terms of 'buying mindset') and find a way to reach them. 

-Relationships: Build and leverage relationships founded on trust and integrity to facilitate opportunities."

These core activities are shaped and driven by both analytical and people skills, abilities that members of the military naturally develop throughout their years of service. A business development manager requires individuals who can command respect from colleagues and lead new missions and projects to help grow the business and bring others along with the project, a type of leadership quality that veterans have developed in their years in the military. 

The median annual salary of business development manager is $72,321. 

#3 IT Manager

Alida Moore from PayScale explains that "Commanding officers commonly order their troops to learn the job of the person above them. Then, if someone is injured in battle, others can quickly step up and make decisions. In the civilian world, an IT program manager is responsible for understanding the jobs of every person on her team -- from coding to designing -- to ensure that a project is completed successfully and on time." 

Information Technology (IT) management is the practice of ensuring that resources are accordingly appropriated to a firm's information technology department. Management of these resources may include computer hardware and software, data, staff maintenance, and other types of networks. Being an IT manager simply means that the IT department's budget is being used to meet the needs of the staff as well as to ensure that the proper technology is being used for the basic functions carried out by the department. It also entails staffing the department and making sure that everything involved with the department's functions, from tech support to software design, is running in order.

An IT manager is important to every business, corporation, and organization that utilize networks of computers for their employees in order to facilitate communication or to promote more efficient working environment. Managing this complex web of technology and structural organization of the department means being aware of some of computer languages being used at the workplace as well as other technical understanding of computer programming.

The median annual salary of an IT manager is $79,584

#4 Software Developer

Software development is exactly what it sounds like. It is computer programming and creating applications and programs that we many of us use on a daily basis. 

Veterans and service members with experience in computer programming or software development itself may find promising opportunities to work for a technology company that highly values those skills. 

There are many opportunities online to develop skills in programming that, with dedication and time commitment, can lead to prospective careers. 

A simple googling of online programming courses and programming scholarships for veterans can yield some rewarding results. An interesting online program to help veterans learn computer skills is Bloc, which "created the Bloc Veterans Program, which will award ten active and/or retired U.S. military personnel a $5,000 scholarship toward any of Bloc’s five online developer and design bootcamps. The scholarship is funded collaboratively by Bloc and its mentors, who have volunteered to donate their time to training veterans."

The median annual salary of a starting software developer is $67,207, while an experienced and late-career software developer has a medium annual salary of $84,804.

#5 Airline Pilot

Airline pilots as well as helicopter pilots are professionally trained to fly large aircrafts for transportation or other missions and projects. While a great number of pilots are commercial pilots, meaning that they transport cargo/products and passengers, there are also pilots who fly aircraft for jobs such as firefighting efforts during untamable wildfires, tracking criminals on helicopters, reporting on traffic conditions in the city, conducting search and rescue missions, and crop dusting or spreading seeds on a large area. 

The U.S. Department of Transportation explains that "Military pilots may apply for airman certification based on his or her military pilot qualifications. 

A military pilot who passes the military competency knowledge test and possesses the appropriate documents will be issued a commercial pilot certificate and/or a flight instructor certificate."

In fact, the U.S. Department of Transportation provides a document that clarifies whether your Military Occupational Specialty area translates to skills and experience in flying aircraft in the civilian sector. It also lists the documentation that is needed to transition from military pilot to civilian pilot or flight instructor. The list can be found on the same link as above. 

The median annual salary of a commercial airline pilot is $60,099.

To search for more opportunities by using the RallyPoint career corner platform, click here.

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