Recognition Before Retraining

The Ministry of Defence runs a formal resettlement process for anyone leaving the Armed Forces, delivered through the Career Transition Partnership. It gives service leavers time away from their unit, a resettlement grant and funded access to training and career consultancy. The process centres on choosing a course and gaining a qualification, on the assumption that the qualification is what will close the gap between a service career and a civilian one. Should resettlement begin with a course, or with a record of the level a service leaver has already worked at?

A Warrant Officer with two decades of operational service, whose last job involved regenerating a front-line warship, might work through that same process and enrol on an 18th Edition electrical wiring course. The qualification is entirely legitimate and, for the right destination, exactly the right choice. Regenerating a warship, however, involves programme coordination, contractor and supplier management, configuration and asset governance, safety and regulatory assurance, resource planning, risk management, quality control and delivery against operational deadlines. None of it is written down anywhere a civilian employer would find it. I have studied the same work through postgraduate supply chain management and professional development in management systems, cyber and AI governance. After eighteen years in Defence logistics, my view is that the mistake in that example lay in the order in which the course was chosen.

The second question

The Career Transition Partnership's guidance frames resettlement largely around training: which course to take, which qualification an employer will accept and which sector is hiring. Those are reasonable questions, and they are also, in every case, the second question. The first is what level a service leaver has already been operating at, and what a civilian organisation would call it. Where that question is skipped, capable people may enter the labour market as though they were starting again.

Analysis of the Veterans' Survey 2022, published on GOV.UK in April 2025 using data collected by the Office for National Statistics, found:

• Just over half of veterans, 52.5%, had at some point taken a job at a lower experience or skill level than their last role in the UK armed forces.
• The two most commonly cited reasons were that no other jobs were available, and that employers did not recognise transferable military skills.
• Veterans who served in ranks below officer were considerably more likely to report skills-related underemployment than those who served as officers, at 56.1% against 42.4%.
• Among Royal Navy veterans, the figure stood at 52.8%.

The Veterans' Survey 2022 is classified as official statistics in development, published as research, and its coverage analysis acknowledges representativeness bias in the self-select sample (Office for National Statistics, 2023). The percentages are therefore indicative of a pattern and best read as an approximate guide. The pattern is consistent with my own experience of resettlement briefs. The second of the two cited reasons is the one Defence can act on, because employer recognition begins with what Defence itself chooses to record. The first reason, that no other jobs were available, falls largely outside Defence's control, while the second falls almost entirely within it.

Structural limits

The Career Transition Partnership provides valuable support, including transferable skills identification, CV development, employment guidance and vocational training across engineering, health and safety, IT, management, transport and logistics, electrotechnical work and skilled trades. Project management, cyber, safety and the trades are all appropriate destinations for many people. The limitation is structural, since a course catalogue cannot on its own establish the level at which an individual has already worked. Two people may both select an engineering course, one entering the profession for the first time and the other having spent years directing engineering outputs, contractors, safety cases and operational availability. Their training needs are unlikely to be the same, yet without a shared way of describing capability they are treated as though they were.

A common language

The Pan-Defence Skills Framework, rolled out from 2024, is shifting Defence's focus from rank to skills (Forces News, 2026). It is a Whole Force approach to identifying, defining, managing and deploying skills. Defence describes it as a single common language for skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, applying to Regulars, Reservists and civil servants alike. Personnel access an individual skills profile through an app, claim skills against it and have those skills validated by their reporting officer or line manager. The validation process even accounts for skill fade. Senior officers involved in the rollout have described it as a move away from a purely rank-based view of what a person can do. That suggests Defence may in time employ people according to the skillset it needs. If Defence can now describe capability in a common language internally, it could describe that capability in a language employers understand externally, since nothing about the framework's design confines it to internal use.

Outward facing

The 2021 Defence and Security Industrial Strategy was explicit that the Pan-Defence Skills Framework would make it easier for people to move between government and industry. That ambition has not weakened under the 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy and its accompanying skills package. Movement between sectors requires mutual intelligibility, so a skills profile that is meaningful only inside Defence is unlikely to support it on its own. The framework would need to be legible to the civilian side of that movement as well as the Defence side, or the ambition stated in both strategies may stay unrealised.

Used in that way, a validated skills profile could allow a service leaver to establish, before selecting any course at all, what level of responsibility they have held. They could also establish what assets, people, budgets or programmes they have been accountable for, what risks they owned and what controls they operated or oversaw. The profile would show what evidence they produced and who relied upon it. Most usefully, it would show which of their apparent gaps are real and which are only gaps in vocabulary.

On a stores account, "maintained stores records and prepared the unit for inspection" describes work that could equally be evidenced as operating a first-line internal control regime, maintaining asset accountability, resolving discrepancies and supporting independent assurance. The underlying activity is identical, and only the description has been recovered. The output of the process would then differ in kind, because the vocabulary would catch up with the practice without anything new having to be learned.

Reading across

Across eighteen years of Defence logistics, fleet logistics inspection and tiered assurance map to operational assurance, internal controls and audit readiness. Stores account management maps to asset governance, inventory integrity and reconciliation, and supersession and handover boards to custody transfer and segregation of duties. Transport safety and dangerous goods responsibilities map to statutory compliance and chain of custody assurance, supervising contractors to third-party risk and contract governance, and sustaining output through disruption to operational resilience and continuity planning. In each case the environment changes while the control logic stays the same. The mapping continues trade by trade in Independently Verified Skills Mapping, beginning with Logistics.

I examined my own work through a civilian framework during postgraduate study, and it was governance, risk and compliance work that had been presented throughout as logistics. A validated skills profile could reach the same recognition faster and more cheaply, without requiring a Master's degree of anyone who wants it.

A change of sequence

The change argued for here is one of sequence, and vocational courses keep their place for the many service leavers whose destination calls for one. Capability would first be recorded using the framework Defence has already built, including scope, scale, complexity, decision-making authority and consequence of failure. That record would then be mapped against recognised civilian reference points, such as management system standards, internal control models, engineering and programme competency frameworks and professional registration routes. Only then would the remaining gaps be identified and training selected to close them.

Resettlement, on this evidence, should begin with the record. The survey evidence, although indicative, suggests that many service leavers take work below the level they have already reached, and one of the two reasons they give is within Defence's own control. The Pan-Defence Skills Framework gives Defence a way to name what its people govern, test, manage and assure under pressure. Used outwardly as well as inwardly, it could reduce the proportion who take the first job that will have them. The Warrant Officer regenerating a warship should not need years of study to reach that recognition. Recording the capability first could give it to them.

The views expressed here are my own and are based on general observations about military transition, skills recognition and Defence workforce development. They do not represent the position of the Royal Navy, the Ministry of Defence or any organisation with which I work. Nothing published here reproduces any organisation's internal policy, procedure or assurance output.