AS a director of operations and logistics at Plated, the East Village meal delivery service, Katie Horgan relies on her Marine Corps experience every day. But the path to her first civilian job was full of challenging lessons, says the 30-year-old West Village resident.

“I honestly didn’t expect it to be so hard,” says Horgan, who joined the Marines straight out of the University of Southern California, where she was an ROTC officer.

After running convoys in Iraq and supporting a 2,500-person, ship-based crisis-response unit during her six years as a logistics officer, Horgan left the service in September 2012, enrolled in Columbia Business School and embarked on what would be a stressful year-and-half-long job search.

Here, she shares the lessons she learned along the way.

Horgan’s first challenge was determining what type of career would fulfill her after a military experience that spanned tours in 12 countries.

“I did a lot of floundering around, chasing leads for jobs that made no sense for me to chase,” she says.

She began by targeting the city’s top consulting firms. But when a summer internship in that field in 2013 left her frustrated and uninspired, she forced herself to jot down a list of everything she wanted out of her future career.

“It was literally the first time in my life that I ever did that exercise — and it was not easy,” she says. “I realized I wanted an operations role because I wanted to have my hands in what’s going on. I wanted to be a stakeholder.”

Horgan also realized that if she wanted to land her dream job, she’d have to more effectively sell herself to civilian hiring managers — who, she realized, were essentially “taking a chance on someone like me.”

“In the military, it is not about you — it’s about everyone else. I never had to tell someone about my accomplishments, or to convince someone I was qualified for a job,” she says of her difficulty sharing her Marine Corps accomplishments with potential employers.

To get over her discomfort, Horgan began honing and practicing a 60-second pitch — and reminding herself that “you’ve done these things, you deserve the right to talk about them — it doesn’t mean that you’re boastful.”

Horgan says simply translating her Marine Corps feats to civilian hiring managers was a challenge in its own right — and often required her to “dumb down” her accomplishments into stories that didn’t do justice to “what [she] remembers as an incredibly complex, awesome experience.”

Her solution? To choose a handful of concise stories that highlighted and illustrated the type of work she did in uniform.

For instance, when an interviewer asked how she handles stress: “I would tell them a story about being on the beach in Saudi Arabia, and the weather went bad and we had to make game-time decisions,” recalls Horgan. “The story gives more color to the role that I had.”

After months of false starts, chasing leads and countless interviews, Horgan ultimately landed her current gig at Plated in June.

So far, she loves the hands-on role and the team-based culture. But when it comes to job fulfillment, Horgan’s quick to warn fellow vets that the military can be a tough act to follow.

“It’s really hard to replicate the sense of camaraderie and family that exists in the armed service,” says Horgan, who recommends volunteering with local veteran initiatives to stay involved. “For most of us, nothing will ever be as intense, as challenging, as educational or as real as the time spend on active duty.”