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# Programs Move Veterans Into Broadband Careers
- URL: https://broadbandbreakfast.com/programs-move-veterans-into-broadband-careers/
- Published: 2026-11-12T02:47:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-12T02:47:45.000Z
- Description: Veterans are wiring 3,400 homes with fiber while they finish telecom apprenticeships
- Author: Broadband Breakfast
- Tags: Veterans Affairs, workforce development, BBLO, Veterans Day, Kelley Dunne, Brian Kludas, Pietro Luna, NLX Communications, Next Level Workforce, TIRAP, Telecom for Vets, Wireless Industry Association, Power & Communication Contractors Association, Post-9/11 GI Bil, SkillBridge, VETTEC, #no-flux, #with-siderail

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11, 2026 – Soldiers drill a task until it sticks. A former Army Signal Corps officer said Wednesday he could probably still take apart and reassemble an M16, because he did it "a thousand times."

### *Highlights Reel*

Civilian construction crews get far less training, said the former officer, **Kelley Dunne**, now CEO of fiber builder Next Level Communications (NLX). "America doesn't have the same training, funding, and budget," he said. His company pays veterans a wage while they learn fiber construction on paying jobs.

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On one year-long contract, veterans are wiring 3,400 homes with fiber, Dunne said. They come through Next Level Workforce, an NLX sister company that enrolls them in apprenticeships and schools that accept GI Bill benefits, and they work for NLX while they earn their credentials.

The apprenticeships run through Telecommunications Industry Registered Apprenticeship Program (TIRAP), which Dunne helped found. The Wireless Infrastructure Association, a tower industry trade group, now runs it and reports more than 7,000 apprentices trained.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill, the main education benefit for veterans who served after 2001, has paid for apprenticeships since 2011, he said.

About 2,200 GI Bill beneficiaries began an apprenticeship or on-the-job training in fiscal 2025, while 78,382 began degree programs, a VA official told a House subcommittee in December 2025.

The need in the trades is far larger. About 200,000 service members leave through the military's transition program each year. The broadband industry is short about 58,000 workers to build roughly $80 billion in government-funded fiber, a 2024 study for the Fiber Broadband Association and the Power & Communication Contractors Association found.

Keeping veterans in that work depends on what employers do in a new hire's first months, Dunne said on [Broadband Breakfast Live Online's Veterans Day episode](https://broadbandbreakfast.com/broadband-breakfast-on-november-11-2026-veterans-and-broadband/), moderated by Broadband Breakfast CEO **Drew Clark**. Also on the panel were **Brian Kludas**, chief operating officer of the nonprofit Telecom for Vets, and **Pietro Luna**, a former Army military police officer who now works to operate data centers for telecom services company Salute.

The three described different routes into the industry, and Kludas questioned whether construction suits older veterans.

### *The first six months*

Civilian employers offer little training, Dunne said. A new construction hire often gets "a twenty minute VHS" and OSHA-10, a 10-hour entry-level safety course.

A young soldier's first boss, by contrast, is a sergeant with "thousands of hours and thousands of dollars" invested in learning to lead. "The US Army, the military is the biggest workforce development engine we have in our country," Dunne said.

Many civilian supervisors see a new hire "as a burden rather than an obligation and opportunity," he said. A foreman can stop calling a struggling veteran back, and veterans dropped that way often "don't even realize when they've been fired."

Employers that invest in those first six months and assign a senior veteran as mentor "will have a rockstar at the other end," he said.

A similar gap showed up in Luna's own career: Managers with seniority but no leadership training. After five years in the Army and college, he found 23-year-olds managing him. "They'd just been there longer," he said. Promoting solely on seniority wastes the leadership veterans bring, he said.

### *Opportunities beyond the trades*

Not every veteran needs to climb a tower or splice fiber in the telecom industry. Telecom for Vets, about two years old, pairs veterans with a sales mentor and experience inside Altaworx, the telecom company its founder runs, said Kludas.

He urged employers to hire for aptitude over industry experience and to use SkillBridge, a Defense Department program that places service members with civilian employers before they leave the service.

On construction, Kludas said tower and fiber work suits younger workers, Kludas said, while sales and business ownership are open to a veteran retiring after 20 years.

Military habits carry over to sales, Kludas said, from "mission planning, discipline, comfortability with rejection" to "leading people without a script." Those skills do not automatically turn into the nerve to ask for the order, he said, so the program starts recruits on a narrow set of products and a repeatable routine for finding customers.

### *A Veterans Affairs course supplied the training, and a data center job supplied the experience*

Graduating into the COVID-19 job market, Luna spent a year as an area manager through Amazon's military hiring program. A lifelong computer builder, he turned to VET TEC, a Veterans Affairs pilot program that paid for short, intensive tech courses.

His cybersecurity course offered little hands-on experience, Luna said. Salute Mission Critical, a data center services firm where he has worked about four years, supplied it through networking, server hardware and fiber work.

Attention to detail matters on the data center floor, Luna said. At one financial technology company where he worked, hundreds of servers looked alike and only a number told them apart. Pulling the wrong one, he said, could take down a stock-trading system and cost millions of dollars.

The work also keeps changing, which suits a soldier trained to adapt, he said. In the Army, the "mission always changes," and data center technology does too. "You have to keep evolving with it," he said.

Luna got through his transition largely on his own, Dunne said, which puts him among roughly 5% of transitioning veterans. "We have to create more opportunities."

### *Full Event Video*