I am currently job hunting and having a hard time depicting what it is a staff officer does.... much less a medical staff officer. Can anyone help me translate this into terms that are more easily digestible please?

I have worked mostly S3 but been privileged to work as S1, S2, and S6 as well. Thank you in advance.

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I am currently job hunting and having a hard time depicting what it is a staff officer does.... much less a medical staff officer. Can anyone help me translate this into terms that are more easily digestible please?

I have worked mostly S3 but been privileged to work as S1, S2, and S6 as well. Thank you in advance.

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For S-1. Responsible for recruiting, employing, and providing human relations support to meet organizational requirements. Discuss what experience you have in dealing with getting the people you need, taking care of them, and handling disciplinary actions or harassment claims.

S-2: Not sure unless you want to do industrial espionage. I guess you could relate it to gathering pertinent information to determine what the organizations future goals need to be.

S-3: Responsible for identifying organizational goals and initiating, developing, and implementing the plans to meet those goals to include necessary manpower, equipment, and materials. Try and emphasize your problem solving abilities and experiences in overcoming problems. Provide specific examples of your success and if possible, quantify that success. When I first got out, my experience with multi-million dollar budgets and justifying budget increases in time of budget cuts got a lot of attention (that's more S-4 than S-3 but it makes my point).

Hope this helped some.

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having a hard time depicting what it is a staff officer does

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Don't take this the wrong way but... what did you write on your OERs? There must be some verbiage that you can re-use from those.

My advice
1. Take it to the Job Network Board
2. Find someone who you know who did a similar job and look at how they describe their experience.
You can look on LinkedIn or ask colleagues for a copy of their resume. My old Tank Platoon Leader buddies and I standardized on a 2-3 sentence blurb about what we did as Tank Platoon Leaders in the 1990s. We made it sufficiently simple for civilians to understand while still alluding to the awesome challenge that the job was.

Here are some examples from a recent copy of my resume. When I had less experience, some of these would had more detail. But, I'm an Information Technology guy, so this is probably still more detail than I should go into these days. Especially after all the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict in the new millenium.

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Scout Platoon Leader, 3-112 Armor, Coleman, Texas
Trained a 30-man Battalion Scout Platoon equipped with 10 HMMWVs, on the fundamentals of Reconnaissance and Surveillance.
Recognized as top Scout Platoon in the Brigade during Annual Training (AT) 1998.

Tank Company Executive Officer, Company A, 3-112 Armor, San Angelo, Texas
Second in command of a 64-man Tank Company equipped with 14 M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks.

Tank Platoon Leader, Company C, 3-112 Armor, Brady, Texas
Led a 16-man Tank Platoon equipped with 4 M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks.
Recognized as the top maneuver platoon in the Battalion during AT 1995.
First run Qualification on Tank Table VIII during AT 1994.

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I will say that I had one interview (for a job that I didn't get) where I talked to the CEO of a small computer systems manufacturer in Boulder, Colorado and during the hour long interview, all he wanted to hear about was what it was like being a Tanker in the Army. How awesome the tanks must be and the gunnery, fire control systems, thermal sights, etc. Pretty ironic that I made it that far in the interview process in a hippie community like Boulder and all the CEO wanted to talk about was my experience in the Army. Nothing about computers except that he couldn't pay me the $110,000 I was looking for - maybe $80,000 ($25K less than what I was making at the time). Funny stuff. Good Luck with your job search.

RecruitMilitary.com has some good tools for translating military job descriptions into civilian job descriptions IIRC

Thank you all for the insight. I figured the answers were in front of my face. Gig'em!