Absolutely. In an ideal world, anyone joining the armed forces would be thinking long term. At a certain point I'm going to retire. I either retire with a pension, stop working, and do volunteer work, or I do a second and possibly third career—the earlier, the better.
As we've said, our own experience is that it takes a couple of years to do a successful transition. For the people we have seen who've ended up in really fulfilling work that they enjoy and stay with, it takes a couple of years to do that. Why?
If you spend a lot of time in the military, you may not even be aware of the options you have when you leave. Do you want to work in a forestry company or financial services, or do you want to be an entrepreneur? It takes a while to figure out all the options out there and what is really attractive to you. Once you've started to do that, how do you set yourself up for success? You can't really do it the last day you hang up your uniform, saying, I'm going to start a company tomorrow. I suppose you could, but it's likely not going to be as successful as if you had put in better preparation, time, and effort, and maybe even education, skills upgrading, and training.
Our advice to people we encounter who are in uniform but are looking at getting out even in a couple of years is that this is not too soon to start thinking about that and setting yourself up for success. You'd say the same thing for someone in the civilian world. If somebody was in banking, or if someone was a lawyer and wanted to get into the business world, that's hard to do overnight. You need some time to actually transition from one industry, sector, or job to another. It's the same for vets.