How do my military skills translate to a civilian job?

You are stepping out of a world that shaped everything you did, into one that runs by different rules, and it feels like your experience might not count out here. It does. The problem is not that your skills do not transfer. It is that no one handed you the map for translating them yet. Think about what you actually did, underneath the mission and the uniform. You led. You made decisions with incomplete information. You stayed calm when things fell apart. You trained others and were accountable for outcomes. Civilian employers pay a great deal for exactly those things; they just call them by other names. Start with one concrete step: write down three moments from your service where you solved a real problem, and describe each in plain workplace terms. That short list becomes the bridge. You are not starting from nothing. You are carrying more than most people ever build.