Book Description

Previous research has found that, compared with their civilian counterparts, military spouses are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed. This work is the second phase of a two-phase study to evaluate data on the Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP) program for the Military Community and Family Policy (MCFP) office. The authors conducted a new query of job postings in 2016 from the online MSEP Career Portal to analyze the types of jobs that employers were posting on this portal and compared the geographic distribution of these jobs with the locations of spouses. Next, the authors conducted interviews with employers in 2016 who post these jobs on the portal and fielded a survey of spouses in 2019 who had recently used the MSEP Career Portal. Finally, they interviewed a subsample of these respondents in 2019 over the phone. Results showed that the MSEP Career Portal lists a range of jobs, but a limited percentage of them are telecommuting positions, which are often desirable for military spouses, and there are more jobs in the Northeast than in the other regions, which are home to more military spouses. The employers interviewed expressed a desire for more and better communication among MSEP stakeholders, and the spouses surveyed expressed some dissatisfaction with the quality of jobs available via the portal. The authors recommend that MCFP attend to increasing the number of jobs on the MSEP Career Portal that would be of interest to military spouses within their specific labor markets.