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Getting Out: WorkWingman for Transitioning Veterans — In Plain English

(Plain-language twin of veteran-vertical-design.md. Same plan, no jargon.)

This isn't built yet. It's a plan, written down and argued over, sitting in the backlog. No part of what follows exists in the app you can install today. It's here so that when it does get built, it gets built against promises made in public rather than decided quietly later.

About 200,000 people leave the military every year, most of them on a clock, many with a family watching. That's the hardest version of the job search, and it's the one WorkWingman is worst at today.

The rule this whole thing is built on

Service to transitioning veterans, not extraction from them.

That sentence is the binding constraint on every piece below. Transition stress is a lucrative thing to sell to, and the industry knows it. This vertical exists to help someone represent real experience honestly. If a feature only works by monetizing panic, it doesn't ship.

The core problem: your record is written in a language employers can't read

You spent years doing work with real weight. On paper it's a code — an MOS, an AFSC, a rating — and a hiring manager at a software company has no idea what it means. Neither does the résumé-scanning software that reads your application before any human does.

There's a public government crosswalk that maps military codes to civilian occupations and skills. The plan is to bundle it into the app so it works offline, with no API key and no account.

And the exact way that could go wrong

Here's the trap, and it's worth understanding because it's the reason this is designed the way it is.

One military code maps to dozens of civilian skills. The lazy version of this feature takes your MOS, dumps all fifty skills onto your profile, and calls it done. Your profile now looks stuffed. Every "fit" score inflates. The résumé writer starts reaching for things you never did.

You'd have a profile that scores beautifully and claims things about you that aren't true — and you'd be the one in the interview, being asked about them.

So the crosswalk never writes to your profile. It makes suggestions, in the same confirm-first list the app uses for résumé imports, and asks: "suggested from your MOS — confirm the ones you actually did." You check the boxes. Only what you confirm counts, and only what you confirm reaches your résumé.

The app is not allowed to make your record more impressive than your record.

Federal jobs, in the same list as everything else

USAJOBS postings would flow into the same job list as any other source — not a separate "veterans tab" wearing a flag.

Postings would show factual tags: hiring paths (veteran, military spouse, disabled veteran), pay grade, closing date. Tags, not rankings. The app won't sort federal jobs higher because you're a veteran, and it won't tell you you're eligible for something — eligibility comes from the posting and from the government, not from a guess the app made.

Federal applications need paperwork civilian ones don't — DD-214, sometimes an SF-15, a federal-format résumé that's longer and more detailed than anything a startup wants. You'd get a checklist. You'd get a federal résumé template.

The app would never submit a federal application for you, and would never touch login.gov. It hands you the prepared thing and gets out of the way.

Contract work, eventually

Further out: federal contract opportunities for people going the independent-contractor route. Same rules — eligibility is a gate, not a score, and there is no "win likelihood" percentage, because nobody can compute that honestly.

The numbers you won't see

Same bans as the rest of the app, for the same reason: contract win likelihood %, a 0–100 bid score, a "federal fit" percentage, a translation quality score. Each one would be a number invented to look like knowledge.

And the app's headline metric will never be "applications submitted." Sending more applications is not the goal. Landing the right job is the goal, and those two things pull in opposite directions the moment you start counting the wrong one.

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