If you’re looking to move forward on your career path, three minutes at MOAA’s Job Board could make your next step much clearer … and help you find the perfect position to match your experience.

“This is the place where you should start to quickly understand where you align with the market,” said Col. Beau Higgins, USMC (Ret), a longtime military-transition expert and vice president of business development at Oplign, MOAA’s job board partner. “The beauty is its simplicity … I call it the ‘easy button’ for talent management.”

How easy? Visitors to the free job board take about three minutes to input their professional background via an online form – from degrees and certifications (for all users) to basics like rank, military occupational specialty (MOS), and years in service (for servicemembers and veterans). From there, Oplign’s technology develops a user profile by asking tailored questions to each candidate, and searches tens of thousands of positions to find a strong fit.

“We’re not asking you to upload a résumé,” Higgins said. “We’re not asking for a bunch of dates. It’s great that you were Sailor of the Quarter, but we want to learn your qualifications.”

This targeted approach quickly aligns applicants with employers seeking their skills, Higgins said. He saw the platform from the customer side while overseeing veteran hiring at Amazon and noted its ability to translate service-earned abilities into civilian positions, helping recruiters who were often unfamiliar with the military lexicon.

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And it’s not just for servicemembers who are nearing the end of their time in uniform: The board’s technology works well for military spouses seeking to reenter the workforce or tackle a new challenge, or for veterans who’ve been out of service and looking for a private-sector pivot, combining service-earned skills with their accomplishments so far in new roles.

Along with Amazon, companies using Oplign to find military-connected talent include Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, USAA, Verizon, and Visa. In addition to MOAA, Oplign has partnered with the Marine Corps Association and Foundation, Syracuse University’s D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families, and Vets in Tech to provide its platform to interested veterans.

Beyond the Basics

Higgins will host a Sept. 11 MOAA webinar dedicated to exploring all facets of the platform, to include how it can not only match users with available positions, but help them build out their skill sets to match the roles they seek. Some examples:

Going deeper: Many veterans don’t appreciate how their training may translate, Higgins said.

“Your secondary duty, your secondary MOS, those skills can contain things thar are valuable to employers,” he said. “Say you were a jumpmaster. That makes you skilled at quality control. That makes you skilled at inspections. You may not have thought about that – you may have been too busy thinking about getting people out of an airplane.”

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Moving forward: Once your profile is created, the platform will provide a pathway toward the requirements you’ve yet to accrue that will make your dream job a reality. This can be especially useful for student-veterans, Higgins said, who want to match their education with their ideal profession but may not be sure which classes are best.

“We can help you go from ‘This is where I am today’ to ‘This is where I want to be,’” Higgins said.

The big picture: Unlike job listings that don’t focus a user’s search, the platform allows job seekers to find out more about a given profession or position in a given area regardless of their location or availability level – no staying up until the middle of the night for virtual job fairs or engaging in a series of unproductive web searches.

“You may be stationed in Okinawa, but you may not want to work in Okinawa,” Higgins said. “We have folks from Hawaii who want to relocate back home to Florida. We have users in Alaska. They’re all able to find support through the platform, to chart their path.”

Get more from Higgins at the Sept. 11 webinar, visit the job board to launch your career search, and find additional support from MOAA at our Transition and Career center.