SkillBridge, without the dead ends

The DoD SkillBridge program lets you spend up to your final 180 days of service working with a civilian employer instead of at your regular duty station. You keep your military pay and benefits throughout.

The employer pays you nothing during the placement, and is not permitted to. You cannot be asked to work more than 40 hours in any week. You remain accounted for by your unit the whole time.

At the DoD level, all three have to be true:

• You are on active duty, or a Guard or Reserve member on qualifying Title 10 active-duty orders.
• You have already served at least 180 continuous days on active duty.
• You are within 180 days of your separation or retirement date.

Your branch then adds its own rules. The Marine Corps, for instance, caps program length by rank. Those change from year to year, so check your service’s current instruction rather than trusting a summary anywhere, including this one.

We verify one thing: that you are serving. Usually that is a six-digit code sent to your .mil address. If you cannot reach that address, a person reviews your request instead, and we hold ourselves to seven business days.

We never ask for your Social Security number, EDIPI, or DoD ID number, and we do not connect to milConnect or any Department of Defense identity system. If anyone claiming to be us asks you for those, it is not us.

Your branch, rank or rate, occupational code and separation date are ordinary profile fields. What we do with all of it is set out in the privacy policy, which is written from the code rather than a template.

1. Create an account and verify your service.
2. Fill in a profile: branch, rank or rate, your timeline, and the places you would consider.
3. Browse opportunities from employers we have verified as authorized.
4. Apply. Your profile goes with the application, so you are not retyping your service record for each one.

Nothing, and there is no version of this where that changes. No paid tier, no “boost your application,” no resume writing upsell, no selling your details to recruiters. Employers pay for access. You never will.

• Not a replacement for TAP, and not a benefits navigator.
• Not a general veterans job board. If you have already separated, SkillBridge is not open to you and this is not the right tool.
• Not a spouse program. Spouses cannot participate in DoD SkillBridge, so there is no spouse account here. There are real programs for a spouse’s own career, and we keep the current list.