Prince Harry is not the only ex-soldier looking for a new job
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Version 0 of 1. In June, Prince Harry will add the UK’s unemployment statistics when he leaves the army. If he is indeed being treated like every other soldier, he’ll be allocated a resettlement adviser, and may as we speak be flicking through the MoD’s Transition to Civilian Life leaflet. If he hasn’t found a job by the time he’s demobilised, he’ll need to arrange an interview at his local job centre (there’s one on Tothill Street, about five minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace). “Make sure you have your MoD form 1173,” the leaflet says. There, his resettlement adviser will help him battle through a thicket of acronyms, with explanations of Graduated Resettlement Time, the Career Transition Partnership, the Full Resettlement Programme, the Employment Support Programme, and suchlike. Changing jobs is hard for anybody, and changing industries harder still, but for the 20,000 or so people who leave the armed forces every year it can be a serious shock, comparable to moving to another country. Official statistics put the proportion of service leavers who were in employment six months later at 83% in early 2013, although this does not tell how much work they are doing, and nothing about how things are going after a year or two. That matters, because it is much easier to find a job after the military than it is to find one you enjoy. “We find a lot of service leavers are led down a path that isn’t the best suited to them, or doesn’t really exist,” says Tom Cummings at Hire a Hero, a charity that helps former military personnel make the transition to civilian life. “There’s security and maritime security. A lot of service leavers go down that route, but there just aren’t enough jobs in that space.” As a result, Cummings says they see a lot of so-called “bounce candidates”, who become disillusioned with their work after a few months of trying it. “There isn’t another army,” he says. “There might be a private security company, but it won’t have the same ethos, the same banter. It can be as simple as that.” In many ways, this is just an extreme form of the uncertainty that school leavers and new graduates go through. The challenge for service leavers is to expect a bit of trial and error, and to think broadly. Indeed, there is now quite an industry out there trying to help them. There’s Pathfinder magazine, essentially a collection of job ads for service leavers, which has been distributed by the MoD since 1991. There is the previously mentioned Career Transition Partnership, the government’s scheme to connect leavers with employers. Plus, there are many online post-military recruitment companies, such as forceselect.com, forcesrecruitment.co.uk and civvyjobs.com. It is hard to generalise, but service leavers’ skills often suit them well to jobs in logistics, engineering or construction. On the other hand, they may just as easily enjoy the cut and thrust of project management or sales. Or something utterly different. There is even the government’s Troops to Teachers programme, which aims to adapt former service personnel for a life in the classroom. Harry plans to volunteer in Africa to begin with, but at least he will always have princing to fall back on. |