Green Solar Technologies is committed to helping make the world a better place by contributing to a healthy, clean and safe environment through solar energy. While we're proud of our contribution to the welfare of the planet, we're also grateful for the contributions and sacrifices of those who have protected us and fought to preserve our freedoms and liberties—the brave men and women of our armed forces. That is why GST is proud to be working with the Employment Development Department (EDD) in an effort to expand our employment of military veterans.

As stated on the website for the California Department of Veteran Affairs,"California's Employment Development Department (EDD) Workforce Services assists veterans and their eligible spouses maximize their employment and training opportunities. Veterans are entitled to many resources designed to help in their search for employment."

Green Solar Technologies COO, Edward Harner, says, "When we interview candidates for a position, we watch for qualities that define the ideal employee. We look for persons with a strong work ethic and a positive, ‘can do attitude who are self-motivated, dedicated, dependable, and team-oriented. No candidates embody these qualities more than military veterans. Unfortunately, the correlation between these positive qualities and a military background is often overlooked by potential employers. We want to do our part to change that."

GST currently employs a number of veterans and recently held a meeting with Rodrigo Garibay, the Local Veterans Employment Representative (LVER) of EDD, to discuss placing veterans in some of our high-level positions. This is something we are very enthusiastic about as we increase our efforts to add more veterans to our staff.

According to an article by Jana Kasperkevic published on Marketplace, "The labor force participation for U.S. veterans is 49.7 percent, which means that more than 10 million veterans are currently not working or actively looking for work." Kasperkevic continues to note that about 10 million of employed veterans are overqualified for the work they are doing, and 1.8 million make under $15/hour.

Harner states, "Whenever we hire new people for high-level positions, we take a chance on them and it takes a long time to develop trust in them. Our country places a great deal of trust in the women and men who serve in the armed forces so for the veterans who join us for these positions, we immediately feel more confident. In addition, veterans tend to have great leadership skills and want to be challenged so we rate veterans highly when we look for candidates for high-level positions. They earned our extra consideration and we havent been wrong yet."

With 2019 just around the corner, GST is energized to renew our commitment to our military veterans. We look forward to the opportunity to expand our talented team with new hires from the ‘best of the best—the men and women who have proudly served in our armed forces.