How to get your JST, CCAF transcript or VMET

Your military training is already written down, and you can still get it after you leave. Which record you have depends on your branch, and what it's worth in college credit is up to the school.

If you're planning on college after you get out, or an employer wants proof of the training you've done, the military has already written most of it down. The courses you finished, and in most branches the jobs you held, sit on an official transcript, often with a college credit recommendation beside them. You don't lose that record when you leave. Veterans can still get it and send it to a school.

Which record you have depends on your branch and, in the Air Force and Space Force, on whether you're enlisted. Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Coast Guard members, officers included, use the Joint Services Transcript, or JST. Enlisted Airmen and Guardians use a transcript from the Community College of the Air Force, or CCAF. Separately, most people who served in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps or Air Force can download a VMET, a résumé document that isn't a transcript at all.

The part that gets the least attention is what the credit is worth. A recommendation on your transcript isn't credit. Each school decides what to accept, change or reject, and how much of it counts toward your degree. Below is which record you have, how to get it and send it, what schools do with it, and how to turn it into résumé lines.

The JST: Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard

The Joint Services Transcript covers enlisted members, warrant officers and officers of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, both those serving and veterans. In the Army, that includes the National Guard and Army Reserve. The JST replaced three older records. If your paperwork mentions AARTS (Army), SMART (Navy and Marine Corps) or a Coast Guard Institute transcript, the JST is what you want now.

It has three parts: military courses you completed, military jobs you held, and college-level test scores. Where the American Council on Education (ACE) has evaluated a course or job, the JST shows how many credits ACE recommends. It may also list courses or jobs ACE never evaluated. Records can go back to 1976, but anything before 1994 may be missing or incomplete.

You keep access after you separate. You can sign in with a CAC while you have one. Without a CAC or a card reader, you register a JST account with a username and password. If you can't reach the email address you used before, the FAQ says to register again.

Civilian college work depends on your branch. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard members can have a degree finished before or during active duty, and college courses finished while they served, added to the JST, but only when the college sends an official transcript straight to the JST Operations Center. The JST doesn't list college degrees or courses for the Army, Air Force or Space Force, so a Soldier sends those transcripts to a new school separately.

If something is missing or wrong, the fix goes through your branch's records, not the JST site. In the Army, that starts with making sure your training record in ATRRS, the Army's training system, is correct and shows the course as "qualified." Navy changes come through CeTARS and can take up to 30 days to show. The Coast Guard uses its form ETQC-1562-10B. The JST corrections page has each branch's steps and contacts, and it covers separated members too.

CCAF: enlisted Airmen and Guardians

If you're enlisted in the Air Force or Space Force, your college record is a transcript from the Community College of the Air Force. The Department of the Air Force calls CCAF the only two-year institution that exclusively serves enlisted members. It awards an Associate of Applied Science degree tied to your Air Force specialty. The Space Force says enlisted Guardians are enrolled in CCAF automatically and start earning CCAF credit in basic training.

CCAF is also why an Airman's records look different. CCAF evaluates many Air Force courses itself and lists them on its transcript, and ACE doesn't evaluate training that a degree-granting school already transcripts. DoD says ACE hasn't evaluated any Air Force jobs. So the CCAF transcript, not the JST or the VMET, is the record you send to a school.

VA sends Air Force and Space Force members, serving or separated, to Parchment to order. Military OneSource tells Air Force members to contact Air University, CCAF's parent. Air University's transcript requests page says it now takes orders through Parchment, from veterans and retirees as well as current students, and first-time users must create a Parchment account.

The order page asks you to allow up to 30 days. It handles CCAF and Air University transcripts, but not AFIT graduate-school transcripts, which come from the AFIT registrar. We couldn't confirm from an official page what a CCAF transcript costs, if anything, so we don't list a fee.

Two more cases. An Airman who also took Army, Navy, Marine Corps or Coast Guard courses may have a JST as well, and the JST site says to contact jst@doded.mil. And because CCAF serves only enlisted members, Air Force and Space Force officers don't get a CCAF transcript for their officer service. We couldn't confirm from an official page what an officer orders instead.

If you're in the Air Force, start early. Air Force TAP must begin no later than 365 days before you leave. At your initial counseling, you have to provide a copy of your VMET and, if you have one, your CCAF transcript.

The VMET: a résumé document, not a transcript

The Verification of Military Experience and Training, form DD-2586, lists the jobs and training your service reported to the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC). Serving members and veterans can download it from milConnect. Sign in, open the Correspondence/Documentation menu, choose DoD Transition Assistance Program (DoDTAP), then open the VMET tab. milConnect sign-in now runs through myAuth, and a myAuth username and password keeps your access after you separate, without a CAC.

Two branches are different. The VMET's data comes from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, and the Coast Guard has never sent any. Coast Guard members get no record and use the JST, DD 214, evaluations and training certificates instead. DoD's VMET FAQ doesn't mention the Space Force, and we couldn't confirm whether a Guardian's VMET has anything on it.

You can request the VMET at any time. Download it early enough to compare it with your own records while your personnel office can help with corrections. It updates each January, April, July and October, and its contents lag at least three to six months, so recent training may not show yet. Block 5, "Date of Information," tells you how current yours is. Service before October 1, 1990, may be incomplete.

The bigger reason to start early is corrections. Every VMET fix has to come through your service, and DMDC says many services can't correct errors after separation or retirement. For separated Air Force members, it says neither the Air Force nor DMDC has a process for change requests.

Know what it isn't. A VMET isn't a transcript, and DMDC won't send it to a school or anyone else. It isn't proof of service either, so use your DD 214 for that. Professional military education and unit- or base-level courses don't appear on it, even when they're on your JST. And Army commissioned officers' VMETs show no work experience, only a note on where to find it.

How to send an official transcript

Schools want official transcripts sent to them, not copies you bring in. The JST FAQ puts it plainly: "As a general rule, institutions will not accept transcripts from a student." An unofficial copy you print or save is still useful. Most schools use one to advise you while you register, and it's what you'll work from for your résumé.

For the JST, you order from inside your account. Open the transcripts area, choose the official transcript request, search for the school, confirm it and agree to the consent statement. The on-screen labels may not match those words exactly. It's free. You can send as many as you need online, and an order placed by 11:59 p.m. Central time reaches the school the next business day. Mailed copies are limited to two in 30 days, and Army and Army National Guard transcripts go online only.

Schools receive JSTs through free accounts on the JST system, and the school's contacts get an email when one arrives. A school can also order yours itself if it has your signed release. If the school isn't in the list, try its name without punctuation or a shorter version. If it still isn't there, the request page has an Official Request Form to email to the JST center for your branch, listed on that page. A school opening a new account should allow 7 to 10 business days.

Coast Guard members get the same advice from their own service. Its tuition-assistance message says to send the JST to your school electronically from the JST site, and its mail form is only for schools that can't take electronic delivery.

For a CCAF transcript, the order goes through Parchment, as above. A VMET can't be sent to a school at all.

To send a JST to an employer as proof of training, fill in the Official JST Consent and Request Form with the employer's details and email it to jst@doded.mil.

What the school does with ACE credit

ACE evaluates military courses and jobs and recommends how many college credits each is worth. ACE itself says its recommendations "are intended to guide institutional decisions about the award of credit."

The decision is the school's. The JST FAQ says each school decides which ACE recommendations it accepts, modifies or rejects. VA says each school decides how many credits it will accept, and DMDC adds that each school decides which credits fit your program of study. Even the Coast Guard's own message says JST credits have "the potential" to reduce what you need for a degree.

That's why the same transcript can count differently at two schools, or in two programs at one school. Each school has a transfer-credit policy, which may be called credit for prior learning. It sets how much credit the school awards, what kind, what documents it needs and by when, and ACE says you're responsible for knowing it. DoD’s tuition-assistance agreement includes examples of how credit can apply, where school policy permits: to replace a required course in the major, as an optional course in the major, as a general elective, as a basic degree requirement, or to waive a prerequisite.

The tuition-assistance agreement explains what to request. A school that takes DoD tuition assistance signs an agreement covering the service members who use it. The agreement requires an evaluated educational plan showing how much prior credit, if any, the school intends to award and how it applies to the degree. This is due within 60 days after admission, selection of a degree program and receipt of all required official transcripts. Ask the school for its prior-learning policy at or before enrollment. The school still decides the credit award. Ask for the school’s decision in writing before deciding how much remaining study to fund.

So before you enroll, get the school's policy in writing, ask for its evaluation of your official transcript, and ask how it applied each credit: to a required course, an elective or something else.

A JST may show credit for your courses but little or none for your job. DoD's VMET help pages say ACE hasn't evaluated any Air Force jobs, any Army or Navy commissioned officer jobs except the Navy's limited duty officer and warrant officer designators, or most Marine Corps jobs. That list isn't dated. You can look up any course or job ACE has evaluated in the ACE Military Guide by service, date, ACE ID, military course number or title. It covers evaluations from 1954 on.

Turning your records into résumé lines

Both records are built partly for this. The JST FAQ calls the JST an aid for preparing résumés, because it describes your military schooling and work in civilian language. DMDC says the VMET's main purpose is to help you write a résumé and fill out job applications.

DMDC's advice is short: find what's relevant to the job you want, copy it over, then edit. If the VMET lists training or skills you didn't complete, leave them off. You don't need a correction for that.

Use the job titles with care. The occupations on a VMET come from your service's computer systems and may not match what you actually did or what your evaluations say. The descriptions are standard ones for that job. So course titles, dates and descriptions come from your transcript or VMET, and what you did on the job comes from your evaluations.

A plain training entry keeps the course title as the record shows it, adds the branch and the year, and says in one line what the course covered. Here is one line from a JST, rewritten that way.

Do the same for each course that fits the job you want. Keep the official transcript for the school and the unofficial copy for your own drafts.

One example, start to finish

Example (fictional) Luis Ortega is a 26-year-old Army sergeant, a wheeled-vehicle mechanic on active duty. His separation date is June 30, 2027. He wants to start an associate degree in automotive technology at a community college near home that fall, using his GI Bill. Before he enlisted, he took two classes at another community college.

In October, nine months out, he signs into the JST with his CAC and saves an unofficial copy. A course he finished in 2025 is missing, so he checks that his ATRRS record is correct and shows the course as "qualified" before he contacts Army JST support. He also downloads his VMET from milConnect. Its Date of Information is months behind, and it lists a skill he never trained on, which he simply leaves off his résumé. He downloads it again after the January update, while his service can still fix errors.

In March he reads the college's credit-for-prior-learning policy, which lists the documents it wants and its deadline. He orders his official JST to the college on Monday, March 15, and it arrives the next business day at no cost. Because the Army JST doesn't list college courses, he also asks his first college to send its own transcript.

The college's evaluation is its own. It applies some of his recommendations to courses in the automotive program, counts others as general electives, and doesn't accept the rest. Another school could decide differently, so he asks the veterans office where each credit landed and keeps the evaluation with his records.

Before he out-processes, he registers a JST username and password and sets up a myAuth username and password, so both records stay open to him after his CAC is gone. For his résumé, he turns five courses from his JST into training entries like the one above, and he writes his work history from his evaluations.

For the work you did after those courses, OperationMOS's free Evidence Extractor gives you boxes for what you did, the scope, the tools, a number and what changed, then drafts résumé bullet wording for you to check. It needs a free account. You type the facts in, no files are uploaded, and it asks you not to paste full records. If you save, it keeps the structured entry and your bullet drafts in your account, not your raw notes.

This is general information about military records, not academic or benefits advice, and no transcript guarantees credit. The school decides, so ask its advisers to go over your unofficial transcript with you before you enroll. Most schools use unofficial copies for exactly that. Ask a school in DoD’s tuition-assistance program for the evaluated degree plan showing which prior credits it intends to award and how they apply.