That's a great question. Often, when I'm talking to businesses about this—and we've been working with a number of private sector partners on building veteran employed resource groups, for example—the first question I ask them is, “How many veterans do you have?” I'm always shocked by how few of them actually count.
I point out that what you measure is what you get, and creating a baseline of how many veterans you have in your organization and then tracking that, both from an absolute percentage point and a retention rate as you write the survey, is the first point. We'll then begin to get some measurement of that.
The other issue, which was identified in the veteran transition report that I mentioned earlier, from 2013 through to 2015, was underemployment. That's a harder one to track, but that report identified that it often took veterans up to 10 years to get back to the earning potential that they had when they left the service. They were required to take the first job that they felt they could get, and they didn't understand necessarily how their skills would be applicable in the private sector.