September 19, 2016 at 1:37 p.m.
Chrisinger shares insights on employing veterans at Nicolet 'Hire Up' event
Chrisinger shares insights on employing veterans at Nicolet 'Hire Up' event
By Kayla Thomason-
Chrisinger, who teaches a veteran reintegration course at UW-Stevens Point, spoke Friday at the latest edition of 'Hire Up,' a series of sessions sponsored by Nicolet College with the goal of helping higher education and business professionals hire veterans, the underemployed and the unemployed.
"There's no simple fix to ensuring that veterans reintegrate successfully into civilian life and the second thing is that the thing that I've seen that works the best is finding ways to help veterans feel engaged where they are and that can take a lot of different forms," Chrisinger said. "It's a slow process sometimes. You've got to be patient but it will pay off."
Chrisinger said veterans often feel isolated, have a loss of purpose and don't share the same life experiences as their fellow college freshman classmates who are fresh out of high school.
"When you come from a situation where how you do everything matters, how you tie your boots matters, all that kind of stuff, to a world where you're on your own, the stakes don't seem to be as high. It's not life or death and if they don't understand why they're doing what they're doing it can be really hard to muster that motivation that's needed to push through it," Chrisinger said.
In his course, Chrisinger strives to help veterans connect to the rest of the university through writing.
He recently edited a collection of 20 student essays that was compiled into a book entitled "See Me for Who I Am."
"The premise is really simple," Chrisinger said. "The students that I had were really tired of feeling like they were being stereotyped and so I challenged them to just write a story about who they were."
He shared some of those stories with the Nicolet 'Hire Up' group. He noted his students respect strong leadership and when he thinks of strong leaders he thinks of the ones who are authentic and are interested in other people's stories.
"Folks who are able to say 'This is me, this is who I am,' 'Who are you?' are going to have that connection with their employees, their students, whoever the group may be, that's going to facilitate that much better than the sort of standard 'I'm the boss, you have to do what I say' kind of model," Chrisinger said, adding that veterans are wonderful workers who have bring a plethora of valuable skills to the table.
"The students that I've had are tremendous critical thinkers, they understand things on a deeper level than a lot of their fellow students are able to and when they do buy into the mission, when they feel their work is meaningful, there is just no quit in them," he said.
Connection, communication and understanding is important, no matter the position, he added.
"If you make a connection with this person and you bring them in and make it clear what they need to do they will finish the job," he said. "And that's something that we've asked of our military, right, for the last 15 years is that we give them incredibly difficult jobs, we don't always give them the funding they need or the numbers they need or the equipment they need and they figure it out and that's a tremendous skill set to have."
Chrisinger said he hopes those who attended his presentation are more comfortable and sure of themselves when they engage others.
"I really hope that the folks who came here feel more confident in their ability to engage with veterans," he said. "I mentioned really briefly that there seems to be this kind of intimidation factor when it comes to veterans, most civilians aren't sure what to say or do and they don't want to offend anybody and so it just gets easier to just say nothing and that's actually more isolating for the veteran to feel like nobody wants to engage with you. So figuring out respectful ways to do that and effective ways to do that can really lead to great connections and can really make the veteran feel at home."
Rick Wolf, Lincoln County Veteran Services Officer and an Army sergeant, found the information presented to be valuable.
"The biggest thing is the different approach that you take with veterans just kind of opened my mind to people in general, different approaches you take to getting them to absorb the information, getting them motivated to do what needs to be done, in this case with the classes," he said.
Mike Biszak, Vilas County Veterans Service Officer and a colonel in the Marine Corps, said he plans to use this new information to guide his interactions with others.
"I think it just gave you some ideas on how to communicate with the veterans that we serve in our counties," he said. "Everybody has a different style so I think we could communicate in many different ways and one is building a rapport, like he mentioned, so we can find those avenues to communicate with our veterans and surviving spouses."
"See Me for Who I Am" is available on Amazon, IndieBound and can be ordered through local bookstores.
Kayla Breese may be reached at kayla @rivernewsonline.com.
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