A Commentary on Barnes et al. (2025) Securing and Maintaining Longer-term Employment;when Does Military-connected Human Capital not Deploy?

Introduction

Barnes et al. (2025) make an important contribution to management and careers research by challenging the prevailing tendency to equate successful military-to-civilian (MTC) transition with short-term job attainment. Using a mixed-methods study of UK military service leavers two to ten years post-transition, the authors shift analytic attention toward the quality and sustainability of employment over time, foregrounding veterans’ own definitions of success. Through a Systems Theory Framework (STF) the authors conceptualize transition as an ongoing, systemic process shaped by recursive interaction of individual, social, and environmental-societal systems. The article highlights the central roles of world-of-work knowledge, identity adjustment, and expectation management in shaping longer-term employment outcomes. Overall, this work situates careers within organizational and institutional contexts, explicitly implicates HR systems and employer practices in sustaining employment, and draws attention to group- and organization-level structures that influence how individuals navigate major career transitions.

However, in emphasizing adjustment, learning, and expectation management as central mechanisms shaping longer-term outcomes, the article leaves largely unexamined a complementary question: when and why human capital (HC) often fails to deploy across institutional boundaries? Barnes and colleagues’ (2025) findings demonstrate that veterans possess substantial skills, experience, and qualifications, yet these are often underutilized, discounted, or slow to translate into commensurate civilian roles (Stone & Stone, 2015; Ford, 2017; Wang et al., 2023). This suggests that in addition to individual adaptation or knowledge acquisition, constraints exist associated with the mobility, valuation, and activation of HC as individuals move between institutional fields. This commentary builds on Barnes and colleagues’ systemic perspective by reframing MTC transition as a constrained HC deployment problem, shaped by organizational practices, career norms, and boundary-spanning processes.

Human Capital Constraints Across Institutional Boundaries

Human capital (HC) theory posits that knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) accumulate through education and experience, with the expectation that investments in HC enhance productivity and mobility across organizations and labor markets (Becker, 1964). This logic suggests that individuals who possess substantial HC should be able to deploy it effectively across contexts, particularly when that capital is characterized as general rather than specific (Ployhart et al., 2014). Military service leavers, who typically exit with extensive training, leadership experience, and occupational specialization, would therefore be expected to transition into commensurate civilian roles (Redmond et al., 2015).

However, military-connected career transitions consistently challenge this assumption. Veterans and other military-connected individuals (e.g., reservists) frequently encounter underemployment, delayed progression, or mismatches between prior responsibility and subsequent civilian roles (Opengart, 2021; Barthélemy, 2025). These patterns suggest that the challenge lies less in the absence of valuable HC and more in the conditions governing its activation as individuals move between institutional settings. MTC transitions thus foreground a tension within HC theory concerning how skills are valued, recognized, and mobilized across institutional boundaries (Aydinliyim & Somaya, 2025).

Skills and competencies developed within the military are embedded in institutional arrangements that shape how work is organized, evaluated, and rewarded. When veterans enter civilian organizations, the cues used to signal competence lose clarity, and prior experience is difficult to map onto civilian role expectations (Dokko & Jiang, 2024). Importantly, this constraint reflects institutionalized evaluative frameworks that govern how experience is interpreted across contexts, even when underlying capabilities are relevant.

Organizational actors responsible for hiring and placement rely on familiar career scripts, credentialing systems, and other distal career signals that privilege normative pathways over direct assessment of transferable competencies. Military-derived experience is often discounted or misclassified, slowing the integration of veterans’ HC and requiring them to rebuild credibility, acquire civilian signals of competence, or accept roles below prior responsibility levels despite possessing relevant HC (Bidwell & Keller, 2014; Dlouhy & Biemann, 2018).

Status Loss and the Devaluation of Human Capital

A central mechanism through which HC deployment becomes constrained during institutional transitions is status loss, resulting in lower performance (Marr & Thau, 2014). Status reflects an individual’s relative standing within a social system and shapes access to influence, credibility, and opportunity (Piazza & Castellucci, 2014). Importantly, status is embedded in institutional roles, hierarchies, and symbols that signal competence and authority. When individuals move across institutional boundaries, previously accrued status often does not transfer alongside their HC, creating a disconnect between what individuals can do and how their capabilities are perceived and utilized (Bidwell et al., 2015).

MTC transitions exemplify this as military rank and role convey clear signals regarding responsibility, leadership scope, and decision authority (Mattila et al., 2017). These signals structure interactions and guide expectations about who should lead, advise, or execute. Upon entering civilian organizations, however, these status markers often lose salience or are rendered opaque. Veterans often possess extensive leadership experience, technical expertise, or operational responsibility, yet enter organizations at lower hierarchical levels or in roles that fail to reflect prior scope and authority (Peat et al., 2025). HC that was previously activated through high-status positions becomes constrained by diminished standing within the new institutional context.

Lower-status entrants are less likely to be entrusted with complex assignments, included in informal networks, or granted discretion over decision-making, all of which are critical mechanisms through which HC is expressed and developed. Even when underlying capabilities are relevant, reduced status limits opportunities to demonstrate competence, slowing the translation of experience into organizational value. Status thus acts as a structural constraint that shapes how and whether HC is engaged.

Barnes and colleagues’ (2025) findings implicitly reflect this process. Participants frequently described a loss of authority, influence, and recognition following transition, even when they remained employed. These experiences suggest that employment quality is shaped by role fit or learning demands as well as by shifts in relative standing that affect how prior experience is interpreted and leveraged. Status loss precedes and conditions longer-term outcomes such as progression, satisfaction, and retention.

Critically, similar patterns emerge in other forms of inter-institutional mobility, including transitions across sectors, occupations, or professional domains, where individuals experience career “resetting” despite substantial prior experience. However, the military context renders these dynamics especially visible because of the sharp contrast between highly structured rank-based systems and more ambiguous civilian hierarchies. As such, MTC transitions offer a valuable lens for understanding how status loss constrains HC deployment more broadly.

Boundary Penalties and Non-normative Career Paths

A further constraint on HC deployment during MTC transition lies in boundary penalties associated with non-normative career trajectories. Civilian labor markets are structured around institutionalized career scripts that define what “legitimate” progression looks like (Dlouhy & Biemann, 2018; Bidwell & Keller, 2014). These scripts privilege sector continuity, credential accumulation, and interpretable role sequencing, even in increasingly mobile career systems. Through these scripts, experience is evaluated and future potential is inferred. Individuals whose careers deviate from these normative pathways often face penalties as their trajectories are difficult to classify within dominant career schemas. Whereas status loss primarily reflects diminished standing and credibility within organizational hierarchies following transition (i.e., reduced authority and influence within organizations), boundary penalties reflect institutional evaluation processes that disadvantage non-normative career trajectories across institutional contexts (i.e., misalignment with dominant civilian career scripts).

Military-connected careers are structurally non-normative relative to civilian expectations. Service trajectories involve early responsibility, compressed leadership timelines, high mobility, occupational discontinuities, and role rotation driven by institutional needs rather than individual career strategy (Redmond et al., 2015). Veterans’ work histories frequently fail to align with civilian career templates that assume gradual progression, firm continuity, and sector-specific credentialing. When veterans enter civilian labor markets, their experience does not map cleanly onto these templates, producing interpretive ambiguity about fit, readiness, and potential.

This mismatch produces boundary penalties, those systematic disadvantages that arise from misalignment between institutional career logics. Even when veterans possess substantial general HC, leadership experience, and technical competence, their trajectories violate normative expectations about how careers “should” unfold (Becker et al., 2023). This leads to delayed deployment, conservative placement decisions, and risk-averse hiring practices that prioritize recognizable career patterns over substantive capability.

Boundary penalties also help explain why HC translation is often slowed rather than wholly absent. Veterans are not excluded from civilian employment, and indeed are often sought by organizations through targeted hiring programs and branding (i.e., “military or veteran-friendly”; Kirchner & Minnis, 2018). However, they are frequently absorbed into roles that underutilize prior experience, require re-proving of competence, or reset career trajectories. HC thus becomes “sticky,” retained at the individual level but slow to activate within organizational systems due to institutional frictions. Deployment occurs through prolonged recalibration, identity renegotiation, and incremental trust-building rather than immediate translation.

Barnes and colleagues’ (2025) findings emphasize expectation management, identity adjustment, and world-of-work knowledge, which implicitly reflects the labor required to navigate non-normative career positioning. However, these processes are not solely individual learning challenges; they are responses to institutional career structures that impose penalties on trajectories that fall outside dominant templates. Veterans are navigating systems that lack clear classificatory categories for their experience.

Importantly, boundary penalties and status loss operate through distinct but reinforcing processes that together compound constraints on HC deployment. Non-normative trajectories reduce perceived legitimacy, while diminished status reduces access to opportunities through which competence can be demonstrated. Together, these create a structural bottleneck in which military-connected HC is valued in principle but under-activated and constrained in practice.

By introducing boundary penalties as a complementary mechanism, this extends Barnes et al.’s systems perspective by specifying how institutional career logics shape long-term employment quality. Adjustment, learning, and expectation management are necessary but insufficient when organizational systems lack interpretive structures that can recognize and integrate non-normative forms of experience. Understanding when HC fails to deploy therefore requires attention not only to individual adaptation, but to the institutional career architectures that govern how experience is classified, valued, and activated across boundaries.

Reframing Transition as Human Capital Deployment

This commentary identifies a core theoretical blind spot in how careers and HC are typically conceptualized, namely the assumption that possession of valuable skills is sufficient in MTC transitions for effective use in organizations. Barnes and colleagues demonstrate that transition unfolds as an ongoing, systemic process shaped by learning, identity work, and expectation management. Building on this perspective, the present argument specifies why these processes are necessary but insufficient to secure positive employment outcomes. Possession of skills, experience, and qualifications does not guarantee their activation within organizational systems. HC can exist without being effectively mobilized.

By introducing constrained deployment as an analytic lens, this commentary extends Barnes et al.’s systems framework by clarifying how institutional structures condition longer-term outcomes. Status loss and boundary penalties operate as structural bottlenecks that limit access to roles, networks, and opportunities through which competence is demonstrated and developed. Military-connected individuals adapt, learn, and recalibrate expectations while still encountering persistent barriers to progression, utilization, and career growth. Transition thus becomes a question of institutional activation.

This reframing carries implications for theory across several literatures. For HC theory, it suggests the need to move beyond accumulation models toward a deployment perspective that distinguishes possession from activation. For careers research, it highlights the importance of institutional career architectures and evaluative frameworks in shaping mobility outcomes. For transition research, it shifts attention from individual adaptation to the structural conditions that govern how experience is recognized and mobilized. Across these domains, the central theoretical insight is that mobility and opportunity are mediated not only by capability, but by the interpretive systems through which capability is valued. Practically, this also suggests that evaluation and selection systems emphasizing direct assessment of transferable competencies could reduce frictions associated with cross-institutional HC deployment.

Future research should examine the conditions under which HC deploys successfully across institutional boundaries. Rather than focusing on skill development, identity adjustment, or employability, scholars should investigate how organizations classify experience, how career scripts shape evaluation, and how status dynamics condition access to opportunity. This could illuminate why some transitions succeed while others stall, despite substantial HC investment.

MTC transition offers a theoretically generative site for understanding how institutional structures shape the translation of experience into opportunity, especially across sectors. When HC fails to deploy, often the problem is about institutional constraint rather than HC scarcity. Recognizing this distinction is essential for advancing theory on careers, mobility, and HC in an increasingly complex and boundary-spanning world.