The room where it clicked.
Three transitioning service members, two laptops, and a peer mentor who's already made the jump. The cohort model isn't complicated — and it's exactly how this program is designed to run.
The workforce program runs in cohorts of three to five. The bet is that translating a military résumé into civilian language is easier with people who are doing it at the same time, in the same room.
Picture a participant — call him Dion — who left the Navy with twelve years of small-boat operations. He'd meet his cohort on a Tuesday afternoon in a borrowed café space above the foundation office. The peer lead, Cheryl, would have crossed the same bridge a few years earlier.
Together they take apart each other's evaluation reports, line by line, and rebuild them into something a logistics company can read in under three minutes. The intent of the program is that within eight weeks all three have offers.
"It isn't that the work is hard," the cohort lead would tell us. "It's that nobody has translated it. And doing it alone takes a year."