Getting A “Yes” From Your Commander For DoD Skillbridge

If you don’t know what DoD Skillbridge (also known as the Career Skills Program) is, here’s the 30-second rundown:

This program allows you to work at a regular company for up to your last 180 days on active duty (also available for Guards or Reserves but I suggest you speak with your transition office about those particulars). You can use this to get job training or work in the same capacity as a full-time employee.

Yes, you read that correctly.

To get the fully skinny on the DoD Skillbridge program, check out this full post I did here.

Prior to leaving the army, I worked for a small (I was the second person besides the founder) tech startup. For my last 3 months, my place of duty was at our office in downtown Durham, NC. The building had a slide, free (and good) coffee, and free kombucha on Tuesday afternoons. So it was a little better than my office on Fort Bragg.

If you are still in the military and are planning your exit, finding space in your transition timeline for Skillbridge can be a HUGE win for you. Yes, there is the obvious point that you get to essentially get out of the military for a few months. But far more importantly, it gives you space to start shedding your military identity and embracing the fact that you are going to become a civilian.

Sounds great, right? It is.

But there’s one thing that can get in your way.

Your boss.

You need their “Yes” for DoD Skillbridge approval

According to the regulation governing the DoD Skillbridge program, a copy of which you can find here, you need the approval of the first field-grade officer in your chain of command who is authorized to impose non-judicial punishment. That means someone with command authority who can give an Article 15.

Without their consent, you won’t be going anywhere.

Before you get upset, know that this is a privilege, not a right.

Location

Know that you may also need to get permission if the Skillbridge position you seek is greater than 50 miles from your base. This is service and base-dependent. Who decided this decision will depend on the service and local regulations.

Everything else

Your service or unit may also place additional layers of bureaucracy on this. You may, for example, have to get the legal department to review your Skillbridge position to ensure that it is in compliance with the regulation.

The reality is that, in military years, this is still a fairly new program (the authorization was signed in 2014). Many people still don’t know about it, there are not a whole lot of details, and there is no defined process to make it happen. All of which makes commanders wary of approving your request.

How to bring up the idea for DoD Skillbridge

I told my battalion commander that I was planning on leaving the army about a year prior to my departure. I was in the middle of a deployment and knew that they would keep me in my position through that and then when I returned I would have about 6 months before I got out. The timing worked well for me to tell the boss.

But I know there can be a lot of hesitation on that decision of “when do I tell them I want to get out?”

There are worries about being shoved into some dark staff hole or removed from your team or taken off a deployment. We all likely know someone that happened to so the worry is not unfounded.

There is not a direct easy answer on what you should do here. A lot of it is going to depend on your credibility with your chain of command and their desire or willingness to let you do Skillbridge.

But you can do some things in your favor to make the likelihood greater that you will receive permission to do Skillbridge:

Bring it up early: This is a pretty big ask from your boss and you need to respect that. Your unit will be losing you for up to 180 days, but you will remain on the books. That means they have one less person to do a job and can’t ask for anyone to replace them. The sooner you can bring this up with your chain of command, the more the idea will start to settle in with them and the more likely they will be to say “yes”.
Be precise in your request: Say exactly what you are asking for:

“Ma’am, I’m asking for authorization to participate in the DoD Skillbridge program. I’m working to find roles as a project manager in Austin and participating in Skillbridge can give me some practical work experience and also transfer into my first job after the Marines. I’m looking to participate from June-October.”

Make it as easy as possible for them: You do not want to have your boss running around trying to figure out what you need to get this done. I would love to give you an exact list of what you need to be done paperwork-wise, but the reality is that each service and even each base are different. Go to your local transition office and find out what forms you will need to complete to take advantage of Skillbridge. It’s now on you to get all this done.

Pro tip: If you can find out all the requirements before that meeting with your boss, even better. At some point they will likely ask, “Ok, what do you need from me to make this happen?” and you want to have a list of the required documents and know what needs to be done for each for the process to be complete.

Mark’s note: I really hope I’m not scaring anyone away with all this talk of paperwork. When I did my own Skillbridge fellowship, all I had was a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between me, my chain of command, and the company I worked with. It was very simple and straight-forward.

Be upfront about expectations: Your boss needs to know that the intent of the DoD Skillbridge program is for you to be totally involved in the process and not still working in the military. I let my chain of command know that my fellowship was supposed to be my place of duty. Having this talk worked out. Over the three months of my fellowship, I had to go back to base to do something army-related maybe 2–3 times. And I think twice was actually just for transition stuff, nothing unit-related. In comparison, another Skillbridge fellow at my company got hounded by his 1SG about once a week for something or another. You do not want to be in that situation.
Create a plan to make yourself expendable: As I said earlier, this is a big ask. You are likely making it at least a little bit harder on your boss to have them do their job with one less person. So provide them with a good plan to take yourself out of the picture at your unit. Get everything done for the team that you can before you leave. Even better, lean forward on some work and help the unit get ahead of the curve on some things. Provide a recommendation to your boss on how you can leave your current position and how that vacancy can be filled. Be ready to answer your phone or email with administrative requests that come up while you’re at your fellowship.

The bottom line is this:

Make it as easy for your boss to say “yes” as you can. Their decision should not come with additional costs and risks for them because you should have already taken care of as much of that as you can. When it comes down to it, all they need to do is say “yes” because you took care of everything else for them.

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