When Army Heroes Return to the Civilian Labor Market

The U.S. Census Bureau's new experimental Veteran Employment Outcomes (VEO) provides information on how Army veterans fare in the labor market one, five, and 10 years after discharge.

These data highlight labor market outcomes for army veterans by military occupation, rank, demographics (age, sex, race, ethnicity, education), industry and geography of employment.

Military occupation is an important forecaster of earnings outcome in the labor market. Among the VEO findings:

• Veterans who worked in electrical equipment repair and intelligence gathering operations in the military have higher earnings when they leave.
• The federal government is consistently one of the better-paying employers of veterans.
• A year after being discharged, the highest-paid veterans were employed in mining and utilities industries.

These statistics from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics are generated by linking veteran records from the U.S. Army to national administrative data on jobs. VEO provides data on about 650,000 soldiers enlisted in the Army who completed their initial term of service and were discharged between 2000 and 2015.

VEO currently tracks only Army veterans but these statistics could potentially be expanded to other service branches.

The VEO Explorer interactive tool allows you to explore the data previously reported in an America Counts story.

Earlene K.P. Dowell is a program analyst in the Census Bureau’s Economic Management Division/Data User and Trade Outreach Branch.