The latest phase of military redundancies has kicked in and the MoD is due to tell 4100 Armed Forces personnel that they have been made redundant – of that number approximately one third will be compulsory with 2900 expected to be from Army, 900 RAF and 300 RN.
Yesterday I spoke with Graham Brown, MD of Forces Recruitment Services (FRS) about the redundancies. FRS was set up in 2001 to place ex-military candidates into employment and since then they’ve assisted over 1500 candidates into work. They now have 23 offices and much of the time in recent months has been devoted to resettling servicemen and women facing an uncertain future – especially those without a trade. As Graham says many of these redundees will never have been to a job interview in their life and need additional support in settling them into their second career. In his experience many of the “untraded” candidates don’t appreciate the value of the personal skills they potentially bring to their civilian employers; things like leadership and management skills, organisational skills and a real “can do” attitude and a desire to get the job done – traits that are highly valued by civilian employers but taken for granted by service leavers.
You might think that during a recession this is potentially the worst time for these redundancies to happen but Graham tells me that there has never been a better time to leave the military, “the skills and attributes of ex-military candidates are sought after by employers and FRS has never been so busy with the demand for high quality candidates.” This is supported by The RECs recent employer survey highlighting a positive outlook on the jobs market with 72 percent saying they planned to increase the number of permanent employees over the next 3 months.
So it’s not all doom and gloom for those leaving…
