It's Veterans Day, and Cisco is proud to support veterans and their families in many ways. For one, we look for opportunities to hire veterans at Cisco: Courtney Beard is just one our most recent hires.

We also train veterans and military personnel for future careers in information and communications technology (ICT) through the Cisco Networking Academy program. More than 41,000 people have participated in Networking Academy courses on military base locations since 1997. And through tuition assistance and the GI Bill, veterans can enroll in Networking Academy courses offered at accredited community colleges and post-secondary institutions. Matt Heffler is one of many veterans who have found a second career thanks to Networking Academy.

And, we help connect veterans and transitioning military personnel to career opportunities that are suited to their skills and experience. One way we do this is by partnering with Futures Inc. -a software-as-a-service firm that has developed a cloud-based software that matches military occupations and skills to civilian positions and ranks candidates and jobs for relevance.

With the Futures platform, job seekers see fewer, but much more relevant openings, while employers get a list of candidates with the most relevant experience for their open jobs.

In a blog on the Huffington Post, Futures Chief Technology Officer Scott Coleman says the software generates offer-to-interview ratios of 52 percent on average, about 10 times higher than traditional job matching methods.

Cisco has provided more than$1 million in seed funding since 2011 to help Futures develop this platform, and we are happy to report that in September 2013 alone, the technology helped more than 23,000 veterans find the right jobs.

Read more about this groundbreaking technology platform in Scott Coleman's Huffington Post blog.