As Retirement Approaches, Vice President of HR Talent Reflects on More Than 40 Years With the Exchange

A proud military brat, Randy Ramirez has memories of going to the Exchange when he was 5 years old.

“When my father was based in Izmir, Turkey, we had the Exchange there,” said Ramirez, Vice President of HR Talent, whose father served 30 years in the Air Force. “I vaguely remember going to that Exchange. We didn’t live on base at the time, so it was our way of experiencing the military life.

“Of course, to a 5-year-old, it was just another store,” he added. “Years later, I came to realize what it is that we do and who we’re there to serve, and it brings that memory to a different level.”

A little more than 10 years later, when he was a teenager, Ramirez joined the Exchange himself, as a part-time sales clerk at the Kirtland Air Force Base Mini Mall in Albuquerque. That memory is more vivid.

“It really was a push from my mother,” Ramirez said. “She also worked for the Exchange. She’s the one who brought me the application. I went for an interview at the Mini Mall. It was a really short interview. It seemed like they just needed someone who could start working immediately, and I could. Karen Miller was the supervisor who interviewed me, and it all started there.

“My first day, I was nervous, excited and unsure,” Ramirez said. “It was a great place to work. I grew to really love it.”

More than 40 years after that day in 1983, Ramirez is reaching the end of his Exchange road with his retirement this month. The road—which had a detour early on—included work on three continents, beginning in retail before shifting to HR, where he has spent most of his career.

The early years—and the detour

Ramirez worked at the Kirtland BX until 1985, moving up to a temporary retail supervisor position for a short while. Then his father received orders to Spain, and he left Kirtland to be with his family. But he stayed with the Exchange.

“It was an opportunity to see the world,” Ramirez said. “After I got to Spain, I was reinstated to the Exchange about three months after I left Kirtland. I worked in the jewelry and camera department at the main store at Torrejon Air Base, which is now closed. I started as an intermittent and then got reinstated, so I’m a testament to how the reinstatement program works.”

He worked at Torrejon until January 1988, when he had the opportunity to work in a civil service job with the Officer in Charge of Construction Contracts—Mediterranean, or OICC-Med.

“I basically was a travel clerk/fax operator/Telex operator,” Ramirez said. “I was responsible for making sure that all the architects who worked on projects throughout the Mediterranean got their travel orders and that their tickets were paid for.”

That job lasted until August 1988, when Ramirez’s father received orders to return to Kirtland.

“Madrid was a wonderful experience for me,” he said. “I was in college at the time, and I was blessed to have great Exchange supervisors who worked around my school schedule. I attended school at nights on the installation. I went to University of Maryland’s European Division. The people at the Exchange were very friendly, very welcoming, very endearing. I loved  working there. The environment was really great for me, and I loved the cultural aspect of working in Spain.”

Back to the States—and the move to HR

After his family returned to Kirtland, they were shopping at the Mini Mall when some of the people who hired Ramirez, including Karen Miller, ran into him and asked him if he’d be interested in coming back. He said, “Absolutely, I would come back to the Exchange.” He was hired back in October 1988 as a laborer.

“I remember the first day back very well,” he said. “I was looking for Becky Barlow, the woman who hired me, but she was off on my first day. The other supervisor introduced himself with, ‘No, you work for me today.’ He said, ‘Follow me,’ and took me out to the garden shop, which is where all the toys had been shipping in for the holiday season. He said, ‘All of this stuff here, you need to get in inside the store. Basically, we needed to finish getting Toyland ready for the holiday season.”

An opportunity to work at the West Side Shoppette opened up, and Ramirez moved into a sales associate role. The administration office was behind the store, and soon a general clerk job became available. After an interview and a typing test, Ramirez was selected for the job. It turned out to be the move that would lead him to HR, which at the time was called Personnel. The Personnel clerk was about to PCS with her military spouse, so Ramirez applied for that job and was selected.

“The Personnel clerk job was where I grew to love HR,” Ramirez said. “I loved what I was doing. I felt like I was making a difference. Associates would come see me for help with technical stuff. A lot of their official personnel folders had to be reconstructed. I was the one who took care of that for 100 or so associates because they were so far behind.”

His HR manage at Kirtland, Maureen Houghton, also helped deepen his love for HR.

“Working for Maureen was great,” he said. “I learned a lot. One thing I remember very specifically about her was that if I ever asked her a question and wanted an answer quickly, she would always respond, ‘Well, what does the regulation say?’ So, I had look it up. That really forced me into the regs and to delve into HR and I really liked it.”

Through Houghton, he was waitlisted for the trainee program for Human Resources management. Not too long after that, the Exchange created training instructor positions. The Kirtland general manager wanted him for one of the instructor jobs. Houghton told him that he should take the job because it might lead to a management role, so he applied and was selected for a training instructor position. After about a year and a half as a training instructor at Kirtland, he PCS’d to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, where he was People Resources Manager—his first HR manager job.

Working at Ellsworth

At Ellsworth, Ramirez worked with a general manager named Maggie Smith—who would later become Maggie Burgess and go on to become senior vice president for the Pacific Region and later for the Sales (now Merchandising) Directorate. Ramirez loved HR, but he had also loved his retail years—he enjoyed the customer interaction. At Ellsworth, he found himself doing a little bit of both.

“When I was at Ellsworth, the Exchange was going through a renovation, and we were opening a brand-new store there,” he said. “What I’d grown accustomed to doing was at the end of my HR day, I would go to work in the main store. What I respected about Maggie was that she was working at the store, too. She had all her general manager functions, but she was also working at the store, and you could tell she really loved it. And being there helped keep me involved in the retail arena, dealing with the customers and associates.”

The renovation gave Ramirez a good behind-the-scenes look at Exchange operations. He helped order fixtures, set planograms and even assisted in setting up the food court. He was almost persuaded to return to retail when he was contacted by Career Management and told about a people development and training specialist position in Okinawa, and he PCS’d to what was then known as the PACRIM Region office in August 1993.

“That experience at Ellsworth, because it’s a small Exchange, I learned about retail, I learned about food, I learned about services,” he said. “At the smaller Exchanges, associates are very cohesive, so you really get that family atmosphere.”

Okinawa—and more

“I was a little bit nervous about going there but it was one of the greatest experiences that I’ve had,” Ramirez said. “I thought, ‘I’ve been to Spain, now let’s go to this side of the world and see what we find out there.’ I was really blessed, because my position was assigned to the region. It allowed me to travel throughout the PACRIM region.

“My first extended TDY was a three-week TDY in Korea,” he added. “I went to every Exchange we had in Korea. I loved learning about the different cultures, all the nuances, the differences even between mainland Japan and Okinawa that even the natives speak about.”

He tried to learn Japanese but it didn’t quite pan out. But he learned certain phrases, and found that people in Japan appreciated that he made the effort.

“There was a local group called Diamantes,” he said. “It’s an Okinawan group that sang in Spanish and Japanese. I learned a song that had both languages. I remember talking with Mr. Yogi [one of the local national Personnel officers who worked in the Okinawa Exchange Human Resources Office at the time], and I took him the lyric, which was written in Kanji, and asked him if he could write it out for me. People really appreciated my making the effort to learn that song.”

Returning to the States—and music

Learning the Diamantes song wasn’t Ramirez’s only musical performance. He comes from a musical family and is a singer himself.

“My father had a band all the way back to when we were in Turkey and I was 5 years old,” he said. “My brother joined when he was 12. I never joined, but my mother and I would be the ones dancing at the shows. Coming up through school, I was very involved with choir and did a few shows.”

After returning to the States to become Human Resources manager at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, Ramirez became involved in community theater there. He appeared in “Side by Side by Sondheim,” a musical featuring the songs of composer Stephen Sondheim. “Sondheim is a longtime favorite of mine,” he told the Exchange Post in 1997. “When I heard that the group was holding auditions for this production, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. What made it all the more special was the fact that employees from the Exchange came up to support me in a community that I was still fairly new to.”

After he PCS’d to the Eglin Air Force Base Exchange in late 1998, again as Human Resources manager for Eglin/Hurlburt and Tyndall AFB, he and associate Sharon McCree sang the national anthem at store events. Eglin turned out to be his last store—in 2001, he moved to Dallas headquarters, where he’s been ever since.

Having an impact in HR

Since 2001, Ramirez has worked in a variety of HR roles, including Career Management and Field Support, before becoming Vice President HR Operations in August 2020 and then his current role as Vice President of HR Talent in January 2021.

His first HQ assignment was Human Resources Manager/Business Partner for the Finance & Accounting Directorate, which gave him another behind-the-scenes look at the Exchange.

“It really helped me appreciate what FA does,” he said. “For example, if you want to make a change to your direct deposit, it’s a few keystrokes in the system for you. But the checks and balances that go on inside FA to make sure that it happens and that it happens correctly and securely  — it was fascinating to learn about those things .”

Although he has been involved in some large projects, he says it’s smaller moments that stick with him.

“Where I felt like I’ve had the most impact is in my roles in Talent Management,” he said. “When you have associates who came to you for advice approach you years later and say, ‘Remember that career interview I had with you and you gave me advice? I just really want to acknowledge and appreciate you for that’—I think those kind of things are what helped me get to where I wanted to be. It’s the small things along the way.

“I also get message from people that give accolades to my Talent Management team for similar types of things,” he added. “It makes me really proud to lead a group of people who have that kind of impact on the associates.”

Retirement plans

Ramirez says that he plans to spend more time with his family after he retires. “We have some needs within the family that I want to be there for,” he said. “I’m there now, but I want to be more there. And I’ve always had a strong interest in sign language—I know some now, but I’m thinking about a certification as a sign-language interpreter. I’ve been fascinated with it since I was a kid.”

Ramirez says he’s loved every job he’s had with the Exchange and that he’s proud to have been part of the organization since 1983.

“People ask me, ‘Where do you work and what do you do and what does AAFES do?’,” he said. “Nobody in the world does what the Exchange does. I oversee our deployment volunteers. It’s a very noble cause, and people step up and volunteer. You’re not going to find any other organization where you’ll find someone to volunteer to stand next to troops in a war zone.

“I’m a military brat, but it’s as an Exchange associate that I really have come to appreciate what we do,” he added. “If there’s anything I miss from being in the field, it’s working alongside the associates and our customers. I’ve always been a people person and have always been proud to say that nobody does what we do. Being able to say that means a lot to me.”