Last month the Chamber hosted our second Hiring Our Heroes cohort graduation.

Hiring Our Heroes is an established, premier program to connect transitioning veterans with businesses, providing training and hands-on experience that translates into a smoother civilian transition. Seven local graduates and several from surrounding states completed a 12-week work-based experience at companies including Microsoft, Amazon and Hearst Media.

We’re proud to support this remarkable program that has resulted in more than 600,000 hires since its inception in 2011. Last year the Hiring Our Heroes Fellows experienced an offer rate of 89%.

Businesses require specific workforce skill sets to succeed, including essential core competencies sometimes called soft skills or critical power skills. These are ingrained in the everyday life of a service member: loyalty, discipline, commitment, critical thinking and communication, making them invaluable assets to employers and our community.

With five military installations in Kansas and Missouri, Overland Park sits in a central location to attract transitioning military service members and their spouses. In a 2022 U.S. Department of Defense report, more than 20,000 active service members were stationed at Kansas bases and 14,000 in Missouri, with an additional 16,000 spouses. This represents 50,000 highly skilled people located near our community with demonstrated skills including:

• Effective leadership
• Mission-focused
• Working in diverse teams
• Strong work ethic
• Creative problem solving
• Adaptable and immediate contributor

More than 6,000 service members leave our area bases annually, many of whom decide to move to other states. We’d like them to stay here, so we’re helping businesses connect with area bases and veteran-hiring programs such as the Transition Assistance Program and Hiring Our Heroes.

The military represents one of the nation’s largest and most diverse employee pools. If you’d like to learn more about taking your business from military-friendly to military-ready to attract and retain service members, contact Andrew and Courtney on our Talent team at the Chamber.