That Adam Schenkel would land in this job may have been inevitable. After all, growing up in northern New Jersey, the veritable capital of luncheon meats, deli meat was a lunchtime staple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“In a food company, you have to have a love of food,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A retired master chief petty officer, Schenkel left the Navy after 20 years to find his niche in meat, as a sales leadership development associate with the universally recognized Boar’s Head brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Getting there wasn’t easy, but for the former sailor, it was worth the trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sampling the work<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To understand Schenkel’s present job, it helps to know that he doesn’t really have one. Since last autumn, he’s been based out of Virginia Beach, Virginia, but he’s hardly ever home. Instead, he spends his time traveling the nation, observing different aspects of the Boar’s Head operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I will go somewhere for a couple of weeks to partner up with somebody doing that particular business aspect. I’ll shadow them at first, then over time they’ll give me specific responsibilities,” he said. Then it’s on to the next position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company calls it a Leadership Development Program. Employees rotate through jobs in six states (New York, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Michigan and Arkansas), gaining hands-on experience along with classroom training and executive mentoring. Projects get more challenging, and trainees eventually get placed in positions that match their skills and experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schenkel sees the position as preparing him not just for a job, but for a long-term career \u2014 which he can appreciate, coming off of two decades’ work with the same employer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I’m a midcareer guy. I am still in my mid-30s. I want to be a part of a company that cares about its people, a company that embraces the idea of longevity, that understands I will want to be there for a long time,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To find that job, Schenkel was happy to accept some professional guidance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deliberate path<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Laying the groundwork prior to leaving the military was “very deliberate,” he said: a one-year game plan for retirement that included taking every transition lesson the Navy had to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I went to every course offered by the Fleet and Family Support Center: Resume writing, interview techniques, networking skills. I literally went to their website and laid out a schedule to attend every course I could,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That detailed initial planning helped him get organized, but could take him only so far. He stayed fixed on his dream job at the time: a legislative staffer on Capitol Hill, possibly with the House Armed Services Committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A quick dose of the real world helped quash that plan, however: Turns out the typical Hill staffer makes only about $30,000 a year, not quite what he had in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schenkel did not find his new path immediately. The breakthrough came when he took the Leveraging Military Leadership Program offered by Exelis and Korn Ferry, an in-depth program designed to help military veterans apply their soft skills and professional talents to the civilian job market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “That really helped me to target my approach,” Schenkel said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The new-found sense of mission helped him pull together his search plans in a highly focused way. With a clearer sense of his talents and interests, he ultimately sent out no more than a handful of resumes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I had expected to send out 200 or 300 resumes, really a massive amount,” he said, adding that the rifle approach was a big improvement on the shotgun. “I’d rather spend four hours sending out two carefully crafted resumes to two jobs I really want than spend four hours sending out 20 resumes to just any job.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Placement firm Bradley-Morris helped him hone those resumes, translate his skills and ultimately land his job with Boar’s Head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While all that guidance went a long way toward positioning Schenkel for success, it’s worth noting that he already had laid the groundwork on the academic front. Before separating, he had earned an associate degree from University of Phoenix, a bachelor’s from Excelsior College and master’s degree from Regent University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn’t easy to get started on those degrees when his first three military assignments took him to Greece, Japan and Italy, but he always knew he’d be moving in that direction. “I was really always thinking about how to posture myself to be successful post-Navy,” he said. “For anything I had in mind, you have to have an MBA.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Getting settled<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Schenkel admits his present job comes with a unique set of challenges, most of them related to cultural adaptation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Just because I was a master chief, that doesn’t mean anything here,” he said. “In the corporate office, there might be two people who know what a master chief is, and one of them saw it in a movie. So the challenge is partly to have some humility, to have some open-mindedness.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finding one’s own direction also can be a hurdle. “In the military, your career is pretty much written out for you \u2014 you know Steps A, B and C before you even get to Step A,” he said. “In the corporate world, you have to prove yourself. It’s not about just sticking around. In that sense, I have stepped completely out of my comfort zone.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he couldn’t be more pleased with his great new job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The leadership program “is a way for the company to show that it values what I have. Even if they don’t have a specific job for me right at this moment, they are giving me the opportunity to show my value to the company. I couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to start a whole new career midlife.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A retired master chief petty officer left the Navy after 20 years to find his niche as a sales leadership development associate with Boar’s Head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":94220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":88,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[15,88],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2158],"class_list":["post-94556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-military"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"ZVCHWTUPFBCGZODMPNKT5MQJZI","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-military\/2015\/08\/04\/transition-strategy-career-sailor-to-corporate-trainee\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n