Do you believe your military service in the reserves has helped or hurt your chances of promotion with your civilian employer? Why/why not?

Got tossed from promotion consideration because the senior civilian told me he'd never promote me because I was a Reservist... twice. Interesting things happened to create a course correction on his part which meant promotion was delayed about 3 years. Also remember people get fired over it. USERRA only works if DoJ wants to go to bat for you. I had several in my last command who were fired while deployed. DoJ wouldn't help out because the level of "damages" wouldn't meet their minimum threshold which was $2-3M at the time. People would get a job sooner. Laws are only as good as the enforcement and that track record is pretty poor.

It has actually hurt me. My employer absolutely HATES when I go on orders, and usually holds it against me. He actually tried to convince me out of joining again. Something about crappy quality of life, paid almost nothing, etc etc. then he tried pulling the "your job here is so important" blah blah blah. It's actually to the point where I cannot wait to drop my OCS package, and if that fails, apply for RC to AC. However, I work in a retail sales environment, so every employee is only seen as a cash cow in my opinion.

Definitely hurt. Nobody joins the military in my area and every single employer seems to have a problem with it even when I notify them way ahead of time.