Alaska VA Job Club: Jump Start Your Career
Army Veteran Celeste Dipatri dreams of becoming a peer support specialist and is using the Alaska VA’s Job Club to ready herself for it.
The winters may be long and dark but one group of Veterans is lit up with hope for a better year with new opportunities. Alaska’s Veterans are using the Alaska VA’s Job Club for job guidance and to help jump start their careers.
Army Veteran Celeste Dipatri has been going to the Job Club for a few months. She lives at the Alaska VA’s Domiciliary, a residential rehabilitation center. Once she gets a job she can start the process of transitioning out of the Domiciliary. Having the Job Club every week makes it easier for Dipatri to look for jobs and get help.
“You’re not stressing, you know, it’s right there…we have peer support,” said Dipatri.
One of the weekly classes she sat in on was about resume building, a topic she loves and makes sure to get the most out of by asking the instructor lots of questions.
It is Dipatri’s dream to become a peer support specialist so she can help others like herself in recovery and rehabilitation. After completing the program and finding work, she wants to return to Arizona to be closer with her family.
Through the Job Club she has managed to take two training classes using Alaska Housing Finance Corporation’s JumpStart program, learning things like basic computer skills, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Dipatri will also complete a certification that will help her become a peer support specialist.
Looking for work can be challenging and every bit helps. Army Veteran Charles Gorman helps run the Job Club and does a lot of community outreach to get companies interested in looking at Veterans for employment. Some Veterans even get signed up for work therapy, a practice Gorman said can hopefully lead to full-time employment.
Work therapy is “a period of time where they can cultivate those [work] habits again,” said Gorman.
The Alaska VA Job Club is open to Veterans and helps show them ways to hunt for and get employment. Topics include resume building, interview skills, talks from employers in the community, and talk about things that work against you when looking for a job.
One of the best parts of the Job Club are the mock interviews. Veterans can volunteer to practice interviewing in a class and then have their answers and presentation critiqued.
The Job Club happens every Monday from 9:30-11:00 a.m. virtually. For questions about the Job Club and to be sent a link to join, call Charles Gorman at 907-273-4044 or Theodore Thompson at 907-273-4072.
