No, being a grunt won’t doom you after you get out

So, you're nearing the end of your glorious time in the military, but you spent it all as a door-kicking, window-licking, crayon-eating grunt. Your command is breathing down your neck about your "plan" for when you get out. You realized two years ago that there aren't any civilian jobs where you're training to sling lead and reap souls all the while refining your elite janitorial skills. What are you going to do?

A lot of us grunts wondered this before getting out. But, the idea that you didn't learn any real, valuable skills in the infantry is a huge misconception. You actually learned quite a bit that civilian employers might find extremely useful for their businesses. Aside from security, you can take a lot of what you learned as a grunt and use it to make yourself an asset in the civilian workforce.

Here is why you're not doomed:

Put those leadership skills to good use.

(U.S. Army photo by Specialist Michelle C. Lawrence)

Your skill set is unique

If you're getting out after just four years, you're probably around the age of 22 or 23. At that age, you've already been in charge of at least four other people or even more in some cases. You have skills like leadership and communication that will place you above others in your age range.

Even if you're not feeling like you have all the experience you need:

How it feels on that first day of using the G.I. Bill.

You can go back to school

That's right. You earned your G.I. Bill with all those endless nights of sweat and CLP, cleaning your rifle at the armory because your company had nothing better to do. Why not use it? You don't even need to use it on college necessarily, use it on trade school to get back out there faster.

The point is this: you have (mostly) free money that will allow you to earn a degree or certification to be able to add that extra line on your resume.

You've worked with people from all over the world in all sorts of scenarios. Use that experience.

(U.S. Marine Corps photo)

You have tons of experience

You do. You traveled the world in some capacity, right? Sure, Okinawa might not be a real deployment but what did you do? You were involved in foreign relations. You were an American ambassador. How many 22-year-olds can say that?

Aside from that, you learned how to plan, execute, and work with several different moving pieces of a unit to accomplish a single goal with success and you learned to lead other people. These are things that are extremely useful for the civilian workforce.

You have all the tools, maybe even more!

(U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Tia Dufour)

With all of these things in consideration, who says you can't get a job when you get out? Well, there are plenty of people, but they'll feel really dumb when they see you succeed.