As Colonel Patrick Schlichenmeyer was finishing up a 34-year career in the United States Air Force in the summer of 2023, he hadn’t thought much about what life post-military service would look like.

He entered the Air Force academy in 1989 when he was 18 years old, and after four years he became an officer. For the next 30 years, he served as a pilot, did staff assignments and held multiple combat command positions, among other stations. Then, in the summer of 2022, he was rapidly approaching the congressionally mandated end of his service time. With less than a year left to go, he finally had to face what life after the military might look like.  

“When I entered the military, I wanted to serve in the capacity that the country needed of me,” Patrick says. “I served as long as I could, and then I had to move on into the civilian world. I didn't start thinking about what I was going to do until around a year before then.”

Patrick knew one thing for certain – he wanted to move back to the Twin Cities permanently. His wife was living in Shoreview, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul, and he was excited to finally be back with her full-time. Despite the excitement, though, he says there was still some nervousness. 

"I entered the academy when I was 18, so that was all I knew,” he says. “I kind of knew through my spouse what civilian culture was like, but there were a lot of unknowns.” 

However, he wouldn’t be making this transition on his own. With his career search limited to the Twin Cities metropolitan area, Patrick began his research on the SkillBridge program in July 2022. 

SkillBridge is a Department of Defense program that helps service members transition from the armed forces to civilian work. The program connects those service members with corporate partners across the country and provides up to 180 days of “permissive duty” for those service members to get on-the-job training as interns for a company, with the ultimate goal of providing those service members full-time job opportunities. According to the program’s website, SkillBridge helped nearly 8,500 service members find work with around 5,000 companies nationwide in Q3 2024.

As an organization that works with SkillBridge, Land O’Lakes showed up as a potential destination for Patrick when he started searching. Once he got connected to someone at the enterprise, he was able to do a deeper dive into potential openings and determine if Land O’Lakes would be a good fit for him culturally. 

“From there, I started looking at the employee website and was extremely surprised at how open Land O'Lakes is about their people, their mission, what the executive leadership team believes in,” Patrick says. “The more that I read and understood what the company stood for, that's something that I felt would be a good fit.”

After a few months, Patrick became a SkillBridge intern at Land O’Lakes in February 2023. He is now the operational excellence manager at the Melrose, Minnesota, dairy plant and was recently asked to be an expert project manager in operational excellence at the company’s headquarters in Arden Hills. 

Now almost two years into his time here, Patrick says it was evident fairly early on that the mission-driven culture of Land O’Lakes and the people committed to carrying out that mission made it a natural fit for him and for other service members looking for greater purpose in their work. 

Patrick’s journey is one of the many success stories to come from Land O’Lakes’ participation in the SkillBridge program. The enterprise currently has 13 SkillBridge interns, 25 service members who completed an internship, and seven of those interns have been hired into full-time roles. 

A cultural connection 

Sh-Landa Redding works in quality assurance for Land O’Lakes and joined the company a little over year ago. Prior to that, she served as a Food Safety Officer in the Army for 22 years. When she was reaching the end of her service time, she said she felt lost when trying to figure out what she wanted to do next.

Once she was placed as an intern at Land O’Lakes, though, she says that everyone she worked with was welcoming and supportive during her transition. 

“My manager was very understanding of my situation and was constantly checking in to see if there was anything she could do to help,” Sh-Landa says. “It was very comforting to see the amount of respect that people at Land O'Lakes had for what I had done and what I was trying to do with my life, and they allowed me the autonomy to figure things out as I was going.” 

A  growing support network 

Rudy Nieman, an associate operations manager at the Spencer, Wisconsin dairy processing facility, joined Land O’Lakes around eight years ago after serving in the military for four.

Though he didn’t go through the SkillBridge program himself, as a Spencer native, he was well aware of Land O’Lakes’ presence and reputation. In his time here since then, he says having the program is a testament to how well Land O’Lakes takes care of and celebrates its employees who served in the military. 

“The community here at Land O’Lakes is amazing,” Rudy says. “In my experience, most people who are leaving the military and are looking for their next step care just as much about who they do a job with as they do about the actual job. It's an equivalent factor.” 

Part of what helps make the transition so smooth for so many military veterans going into corporate rolls is people such as Patrick, who now also serves as a SkillBridge ambassador, helping those service members navigate the transition.  

As one of five ambassadors at Land O’Lakes, Patrick is able to make a personal connection with incoming service members and help them figure out what they’re looking for, what their goals are and how they can best use their skills in the civilian world.  

Through the SkillBridge program, as well as a culture of service and giving back, Patrick says Land O’Lakes has done so much to provide military service members a new home after their military careers. 

"Land O'Lakes lives up to the hype. I really feel it's another place, another family where I can serve. In the military, you're not in a job. You're not even in a career. You're in a service. You become a family with the people you serve with, and I feel like Land O'Lakes has that. I wasn't looking for a job -- I was looking for some place where I could go to work with good people who care about each other that are doing something important for this country. That's Land O'Lakes."