Labor Department Launches New Jobs Site for Vets

If a Labor Department project goes according to plan, veterans might soon find all government agencies’ job resources on a single website.

This week, Labor launched Veterans.gov, which lets veterans search for job postings, locate career centers and perform self-assessments. It’s an attempt to connect disparate employment programs across the federal government. Employers can also post job openings in their own departments directly on the site.

In its first iteration, Veterans.gov is a Web portal linking back to other agencies’ own veteran-focused hiring program sites, including at the departments of Agriculture and Energy. It’s also part of a broader federal effort to consolidate veteran-focused program information online, simplifying the search process.

“We’re not designing this to be purely an online portal,” Teresa Gerton, deputy assistant secretary of that Labor’s Veterans Employment Training Service, told Nextgov.

Instead, it’s meant to connect veterans with the right people at the agencies interested in hiring them. The department can also use Veterans.gov to promote those agencies developing their own veteran employment programs.

Getting all those programs to feed into Veterans.gov is more of an outreach challenge than a technical one, Gerton explained.

The site could evolve, Gerton said. Her team plans to collect analytics about how many veterans are using various features, including a career interest profile, or a translator tool letting veterans find jobs matching the military skills, to find out which elements are most valuable.

Last year, the Veterans Affairs Department quietly unveiled Vets.gov, the beta version of a website designed to provide veterans with single sign-on access to all their online benefits. Months before, VA Secretary Robert McDonald said some of VA’s websites have confusing names -- such as Blue Button, which lets veterans download their own medical records, adding, "If I went to a veteran and said, 'What's Blue Button?' they would have no idea." He added, "What's wrong with 'Veterans.gov,' or 'Vets.gov'?"

However, Veterans.gov isn’t a VA site -- the Labor Department has owned the domain for years, Gerton said. The new site has little connection to the VA-operated Vets.gov, which has its own similar set of employment content for job seekers, including a resume builder.