Darya Bilan, a former military servicewoman, entrepreneur, and founder of an international travel-organization company, shared her own experience of returning to civilian life after military service in a guest column for the lifestyle project Wave RBC.UA. The central idea of her reflections is that veterans should not be afraid to start something new or change their field of work: a career change is not an admission that past efforts were meaningless, but an opportunity to reassemble the experience you have already accumulated. Bilan emphasizes that she is one of those people who, at 18, did not know what she wanted to become, and before finding her true calling she changed careers about five times.
Five Careers Before Service
According to Bilan, her professional path before the military looked like a string of seemingly unrelated stages: she worked as a nanny, then became an English teacher and opened her own small school, sold sports equipment, and worked as a stretching coach. However, as she notes, she now understands that none of these stages was in vain. Teaching taught her to work with people and explain complex things in simple words, her own school gave her first entrepreneurial experience, sales gave her communication skills and an understanding of client needs, and coaching gave her discipline and the ability to motivate.
Service as a Turning Point
In Bilan's assessment, military service gave her "a completely different level of responsibility, endurance, organization, and the ability to act in conditions where far from everything depends on you." It was precisely after service that the question of "what's next" arose for her, as it does for many servicemembers. She admits that returning to civilian life is not always accompanied by a ready-made plan: sometimes a person simply does not know what they want to be or where to go, and in her view that is perfectly normal. At that point Bilan returned to what had always fascinated her—organizing travel—but she entered the field as a different person, carrying the experience of all her previous careers, her service, her work with people, and her management experience.
A New Professional Path
Today Bilan organizes bespoke travel experiences and premium yacht flotillas and, in her words, for the first time does not think about which career to choose next. She feels that she has found a direction in which she can combine everything she is good at and loves: people, travel, organization, responsibility, creativity, and entrepreneurship. The key takeaway of the column is that, in essence, she has not been changing direction all this time but rather gathering experience that eventually came together into a single picture. A new path, therefore, does not begin with finding yourself on a blank sheet of paper, but with understanding who you have already become.
Advice for Those Returning from Service
For those returning from service who do not know what they want to be in civilian life, Bilan advises not to demand an instant answer from yourself and not to rush to find a "career for life." It is important to allow yourself to try things and not to treat your previous experience as wasted time simply because today you want to do something different. Instead of asking "where do I start from scratch," she suggests looking at everything you have already been through and asking yourself: "What from this experience do I want to carry with me further?" In her view, that is precisely the main answer to the question of returning to civilian life after service.
