Making order out of chaos — and other transferable skills.

New employee affinity group BEAVS advocates for veterans working at OSU. 

Story by Gary Dulude

You might think military experience wouldn’t apply to a job at Oregon State University. Bernie Wang would like you to think again. 

Now the assistant to the school director in the College of Liberal Arts’ School of Communication, Wang had spent 33 years — his entire adult life — in the U.S. Navy when he retired as a Captain at age 55 in 2021. Originally from Seattle but stationed overseas for most of his career, Wang landed in Oregon because that’s where his kids were. “Corvallis is the longest I’ve lived in one place,” he says. 

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For Wang, the transition from a military to a civilian career was difficult, and many veterans share his experience. So he’s helping to make that transition easier — and build community — through BEAVS, the Beaver Employee Association for Veteran Success. Wang was one of the founding members for this employee-run affinity group and serves as the internal communications lead for the BEAVS steering committee. 

Oregon law requires public employers to grant certain preferences in hiring to veterans and disabled veterans. What BEAVS can do is to help the university — particularly hiring committees, search advocates and HR professionals — better understand the skill sets veterans bring and how they translate to civilian jobs, Wang says. 

Wang gives his naval career as an example. He was a surface warfare officer for 20 years and a foreign area officer for 13, jobs he describes in civilian terms as a ship driver and a “diplomat in uniform.”  Even then, just based on job titles, “nobody would understand what I did for a living,” he says. “But break it down to individual elements, and it’s very translatable.” 

For example, much of Wang’s work as an officer was administration. “I managed a community of 400 officers, so I had a lot of HR skills. I had a lot of administrative skills, making policy, following policy, purchasing and managing the budget.” 

Another transferable skill, something the military teaches everyone from day one of boot camp, is to function in chaos, which is what combat essentially is. That means veterans “have extremely strong skills in dealing with changing and ambiguous environments,” Wang says. “We make order out of chaos. When we see a need, we fill it. We’re biased toward action.” 

Wang notes most service members take on different jobs with every new duty station, so they’re constantly developing new skill sets. “In the military, you don’t go into a job without training or going to school,” he says. But it’s often difficult to translate “what we know we’re capable of doing” into a one-page résumé and language that makes sense to someone who hasn’t spent time in the military. 

BEAVS’ second priority is building community among the roughly 250 veterans who already work at Oregon State, many of whom don’t know each other. That became clear at last year’s Veteran’s Day Breakfast, which was the genesis of the BEAVS program, Wang says. “We see all these people, and we had no idea any of them were veterans.” 

BEAVS also plans to help veterans who are new to Corvallis. One of the initiatives is a BEAVS sponsorship program that pairs current veteran employees with new veteran hires to help with practical matters like where to live, where to shop and what it’s like to live here. “We want to make sure they understand that they are not on their own when they come into this new environment at OSU,” Wang says. 

Only about 1% of the American population has served in the military, which means “99% of people have no idea what the heck we do,” Wang says. BEAVS is working to change that by highlighting the different backgrounds and experiences veterans offer to the workforce at OSU. 

“We are a net positive contributor to the university. All of us bring a lot more than what it seems on a piece of paper.”