When Holly Mosack left the U.S. Army after nearly 8 years of service, she knew she needed a job, but she didn’t know what to do."  “It was really a feeling of I didn’t know what I was qualified for,” she said in a phone interview with Patch. Mosack, an Illinois native,  found a job in Ohio through an Army recruiter, but it wasn’t what she really wanted. “I didn’t care for it,” she said, “But like many service members I took the first job I got.” Less than a year later, Mosack moved back home, to Peoria, Il., and found a job with Advanced Technology Services (ATS). The company was looking to …

Patch recently sat down with Afghanistan veteran Kevin Hargrave, 49, of Rosedale as part of a series, Maryland Vets: Jobs Wanted, which looks at the challenges of veterans who return from war and face a tough job market. It's one veteran's story of transition. Hargrave, a father of five, escaped a life of selling drugs in east Baltimore to join the Marines, and now he believes he has achieved the American Dream -- a dream he clings to while coping with everyday realities, including that of having a 15-year-old daughter who is paralyzed from the waist down after a hit and run accident in …

Maryland veterans are speaking out, as this video shows. They fought overseas, sometimes on multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and returned home to find sparse job opportunities. Patch has been covering the issues of unemployed veterans in our series entitled “Maryland Vets: Jobs Wanted.” To see a list of businesses interested in hiring vets, go here. Editors recently interviewed about a dozen veterans at a job fair in Baltimore hosted by the Maryland Department of Transportation, where veterans spoke about the transition from military to civilian life, and the shocking realities of the …

This story was updated Thursday at 12:00 p.m. to reflect job opportunities for veterans in Perry Hall and Annapolis. A recent series of Patch stories reporting the difficult situations faced by veterans without jobs triggered responses from across the region offering reactions and ideas for help. Do you have a job opening or idea for how veterans can find jobs in Maryland? Tell us in comments. Here’s a roundup of what we’ve heard from you: Howard County Department of Fire & Rescue Services: Spokeswoman Jackie Cutler wrote to Patch that the department will be specifically asking military …

Patch has begun telling some of the stories of the struggles of veterans facing fewer employment opportunities, and the successes, too. We want to do more. If you are a veteran and are looking for work, we invite you to contact us and answer the questions below, so we can put your job search information on our sites. Below is a submission from Robert Castellano. 1. Name, rank, age, town, brief work/service history. I am Robert Castellano, Air Force Chief Master Sergeant, 47 years old, and live in West River, MD.  I have 27 years of uniformed service with my start in logistics, eight years as …

In September 2008, two things happened: The world economy collapsed, and I was looking for a job. Since I was leaving the Navy, I used a “military career transition service,” which helps you with interview preparation, resume writing and culminates in a one-day/10-interview extravaganza. From those 10 initial interviews, I received nine “call-backs,” or second interviews; I turned down seven of them. This was not a smart decision. In retrospect, my standards were too high, my self-regard a bit … overly optimistic. I also had no plan beyond this one day of interviews. I figured with 10 …

When Andrew Smith III talked with his U.S. Marine Corps platoon mates in Iraq before he returned to Maryland in 2009, he recalled they agreed finding a job in a recession would be tough. But he said he never imagined it would be like this. Smith said he sleeps four hours a night to make time for his part-time job loading baggage for Delta Airlines, training classes in the afternoons and searching for a full-time job with benefits to support his wife and two kids without relying on food stamps and other assistance. But last week, during a job fair organized by the Maryland Department of …

Stephanie Gilbert of Pasadena served six years as an Arabic linguist and was an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan before being honorably discharged last year. The former staff sergeant is now pursuing a degree in financial economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. But when it came time for the 27-year-old veteran to seek financial services internships this summer, Gilbert was shocked when she was passed over. Twice. “I’m 27 years old and I’m applying for internships,” she said. “It’s disconcerting when a 19-year-old gets the internship instead of me. It’s like, ‘What…