AIR FORCE E-7, 1998-2018 — Twenty years of maintenance, four months of corporate confusion

Crew chief on F-15s for most of my career. Retired as a Master Sergeant. Twenty years of fixing fighter jets at four bases. First civilian gig was supply chain analyst at a Tier 1 auto parts manufacturer. On paper a great translation: I had managed spare parts at the squadron level, run a small shop, supervised junior airmen. In practice, four months of total confusion. The work was the same. The vocabulary was not. Nobody called a fault a 'gripe.' Nobody called a process a 'tech order.' Performance reviews were annual instead of quarterly. The mission was 'shareholder value,' which I did not know how to plan for and which my new boss could not really explain when I asked. FourBlock had not been on a campus near me when I was getting out, but I called them anyway and they connected me to an alum at the same company in a different division. We met for coffee. He translated. The corporate world doesn't have an OPORD; it has quarterly OKRs. It doesn't have a PME pipeline; it has performance reviews and informal sponsorship. It doesn't have a command climate survey; it has employee engagement scores. None of these are foreign once you have somebody patient enough to translate. I needed the translator. I would have quit without one. I am writing this in case you are also four months in and considering quitting. Find a translator first.