Thanks, Scott.
Thanks to the committee for allowing me to speak on this important topic.
I served in the U.S. military for 30 years, the last four in combat both in Iraq and Afghanistan. I retired in October 2011 and began my own transition into civilian life. While my story is not unique, it highlights many of the same issues young men and women face when they take off the uniform. Notably, how do I tell my story of what I can bring to an employer? How can I translate these seemingly unique experiences into a language they will understand? Even I, the two-star admiral, face such questions. I have the greatest empathy for the young men and women who have the same challenge and hurdles when they re-enter the job market.
Monster understood the value I brought as a senior executive and today I represent Military.com as its president. We're the largest online community resource for military personnel, active and reserve, veterans, and their families. We boast over 10 million members, and while the vast majority are from the United States, thousands of Canadians visit our website each and every month.
At Monster, we realize the importance of the overall transition challenge to our service personnel as they prepare for civilian life. Military.com serves both as an online community and as an information portal to help them with the myriad of complex issues around pay, benefits, and for purposes of today's discussion, employment.
One of the features of our website is the transition centre. This section is dedicated to supporting the specific needs of service members as they transition out of uniform. The resources include guidance to transitioning health care for the ill and injured, relocation resources, benefit eligibility, and career mentoring, along with timely information, planning guides, and checklists for finding the right job. The key to all this is the military skills translator.
Our military skills translator uses world-leading algorithms that literally take every single documented skill set that a service member has achieved and been trained and certified in, and translates that into matching civilian skill sets used by human resources departments to code open jobs. The military skills translator also factors in years of service and rank, etc., to better match a service member to future employment. When this set of data is compared against open jobs, such as the hundreds of thousands we carry on Monster.com, a service member receives immediate feedback on potential opportunities.
We all recognize that there is still more to getting a job than just matching military skills to civilian skills, but the success of this translator is undeniable. There were 2.5 million unique views of the military skills translator in 2014, and over 800,000 U.S. veterans have used the tool to date to support their transition. In December 2014, the military skills translator was awarded the most innovative use of technology by the Northern Virginia Technology Council for its contributions to furthering veterans' employment.
Equally exciting and powerful, there are customized versions of this tool now with more than 50 private companies in the United States, along with a number of veteran support organizations and trade associations. For example, The Home Depot has integrated a customized version of the MST, the military skills translator, into its own employment website, helping to hire veterans to meet its internal hiring goals.
Let me close by thanking the committee for taking on this critical issue. You should be proud of the highly skilled and professional military personnel that represent and protect Canada. They have a great contribution to make to the civilian world. Investing in a military skills translator is a tangible way for the Canadian government to ensure that it retains the investments made in its military long after they step down from uniform. Canada deserves the very best and its veterans will continue to serve in equally meaningful ways in the civilian job market. All they ask is a little help making that transition a reality.
Thank you very much.