Monthly Archive for October, 2006

50%!?

Published
by
Patrick
on October 3, 2006
in Uncategorized
. 4 Comments
In the last few months, the Air Force has announced that they are going to be asking 40,000 people to leave the service. This is all supposed to be accomplished by 2011. A large portion of those 40,000 are going to be officers. They’ve published numbers by job code and by year of commission for how many people they’re going to kick out. My job code, communications, was the hardest hit. My year group is the 3rd largest percentage of communicators they’re asking to leave. A little over 50% of my year group will either have to voluntarily separate from the Air Force or will be kicked out by 2011. 50%! That’s just a coin toss. They’re currently offering to buy you out, as it were, and give you a payment to voluntarily separate. For me that is equal to $67,500.

It’s just hard to bear that this service that I have enjoyed could all be reduced to money. I have not been in it for the money. Supposedly they need the money they would be paying us to pay for new airplanes. This makes sense as our planes are old, but that doesn’t mean I like it. 2 deployments in 2 years was already making me think twice about accepting another assignment after Japan, and $67,500 is awfully tempting. Sharron and I have talked about it though and we’ve decided to stick it out. At least for now. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have me start working on my resume and start thinking about what I’d want to do if I weren’t in the Air Force.

So what would I do? I really have no idea. For a lot of people they could transition over to a similar job in the civilian sector. I’ve done such varied things though, that there isn’t any basis for that. I’m sure as hell not going to do contract management like I did in Colorado. I’m also not interested in software development like I did in Alabama. That leaves doing executive officer work. Are there even jobs out there like that? I have no idea. My like/dislike for this job is largely dependant on who my boss is anyway.

I really have been racking my brain and I just can’t come up with a job that sounds good. Sharron did, but I’ll get to that. I like to write, but I’m not nearly good enough to do anything even close to professional with that. I like to play games: video, board, role playing, etc. I don’t really think that translates into any kind of well paying job either. I had a great time in Iraq doing oversight for network infrastructure installation. I have no idea what kind of jobs are available for that, but I doubt there are many managerial positions open that don’t require experience, at least none that would accept 4 months in Baghdad as experience. I enjoy working with communications technologies, but have no technical background. Sharron found an interesting job listing with Google that would be a technology manager of some kind. The job description sounded right up my alley as they mentioned a large need for interpersonal skills and the ability to meet with partners and such. It really sounded like the job was made for me, except that they wanted someone with a technical background in Unix and few other systems. I’m no slacker in the tech world. I can pick up anything I’ve ever tried to learn, I’ve just never tried with a lot of these network and server type systems. I feel that this would really hurt me in my options for any type of communications or technology job.

I feel like I’m back in my senior year of high school or something and trying to figure out what to do with my life. Well I know what it is and that’s being in the Air Force.