been at this for about four months now, so i have enough reps to share what i've learned. former logistics officer, 8 years army, managing multi-million-dollar equipment inventories and 60-person teams. sounds impressive in the military. on a civilian resume it reads like a different language.
the jargon problem is real but fixable. 'OIC of HHC S4 section' means nothing to a civilian ATS or recruiter. i had to basically translate every title and every bullet. 'Logistics Officer' became 'Operations Manager.' the section became 'led a 12-person logistics operations team.' it felt weird to simplify it but it's the right move.
scale is your asset, use it. i was managing $4.2M in equipment accountability and coordinating supply chains across three deployed locations. those numbers are genuinely impressive in an ops or supply chain context. the problem was i buried them in military-speak. once i led with the scale clearly, i started getting callbacks for ops manager and supply chain roles.
skills to explicitly call out that transfer well: budget management and accountability (seriously underrated, most orgs struggle with this) leading teams through ambiguity with incomplete information training and developing junior staff cross-functional coordination under hard constraints
what didn't work for me: trying to break into software without a technical background to back it up. i've seen some transition programs push this hard and i think it sets people up to fail. i'm targeting ops, project management, supply chain, and program management roles. the fit is more honest and my resume makes more sense.
if anyone's in a similar spot and wants to swap notes, drop a reply. this transition is harder than it looks from the outside and i'm still figuring it out.