Nine things military logisticians do every week, described in the language a civilian assurance function would use for them. The control logic stays the same across both vocabularies.
Just over half of UK veterans say they have at some point taken a job below the level of their last military role, and one of the two most cited reasons is that the employer did not recognise their transferable skills. I think the problem is mainly one of translation, and it runs in both directions: the individual cannot name what they did, and the recruiter has no way to price it.
This table is my attempt at one direction of that translation. The left column is what the work is called on a unit. The middle is what the control does. The right is what the same activity is called in an assurance, audit or risk function, with the published frameworks where it lives.
It is deliberately generic. Nothing here describes any particular organisation's procedures, and everything on the right can be checked against a public standard. Do the thing on the left, and the control on the right has already been operated. The vocabulary is the only thing missing.
Logistics inspection
A scheduled, tiered inspection against a published standard, conducted by a body outside the unit being inspected.
Independent testing of whether declared compliance matches observed practice, producing evidence a higher authority relies on, with findings tracked to closure.
Second and third line assurance
Internal audit and independent control testing, with a defined finding lifecycle.
Stores accounting and stocktaking
Maintaining the account, counting physical holdings on a cycle, and investigating why the count and the record disagree.
Periodic verification that the recorded asset state matches the physical one, with variances investigated rather than adjusted away.
Asset accountability and reconciliation
Inventory integrity, existence testing, variance investigation and inventory of assets.
Supersession and handover
Formal transfer of an account between two named individuals, with a certificate signed by both and retained.
Accountability passes explicitly rather than by assumption, and at least two people are on record for the state of the account at the point of transfer.
Custody transfer and segregation of duties
Documented handover of control ownership; dual authorisation at the point of change.
Dangerous goods and transport safety
Classifying, documenting and moving regulated cargo under statutory requirements, with named competent persons.
Legal obligations attach to the movement itself, and the evidence of compliance is created by the people doing the moving.
Statutory compliance and chain of custody
Regulated goods handling, competent person regimes and traceable custody records.
Supervising contractors
Overseeing external parties working on your equipment or in your space, to your standard, on your timeline.
Risk outside the organisation is managed through what the contract requires and what the supervision verifies.
Third-party risk and contract governance
Supplier relationship security, performance monitoring and right-to-audit provisions.
Technical publication and data control
Ensuring the version of the document in use is the current one, and that controlled information reaches only those entitled to it.
Configuration and classification are the same discipline applied to information: the right version, to the right people, with a record of who holds it.
Information classification and access control
Classification schemes, document control, need-to-know access and export control where technical data is involved.
Write-off and exception authority
Losses and discrepancies above a threshold cannot be cleared locally, and must be authorised at a defined level.
Materiality decides who is allowed to make the decision, and the escalation itself creates the audit trail.
Delegated authority and exception reporting
Authority matrices, materiality thresholds and escalation routes for exceptions.
Remedial action tracking
Findings from an inspection are assigned an owner and a date, and are followed up until they are closed.
A finding that is recorded but never closed is not a control. Closure has to be evidenced by someone other than the person who caused it.
Corrective action and finding closure
Root cause analysis, corrective and preventive action and management review of open findings.
Sustaining output under disruption
Keeping a platform supported when the supply chain, the schedule or the manning does not do what the plan assumed.
Continuity is tested by the disruption, not by the plan. The measure is what degraded gracefully and what stopped.
Operational resilience and continuity
Business continuity management, impact tolerance and single-point-of-failure analysis.
It is a translation aid for people describing their own experience. It is not a compliance mapping, and no organisation should treat a row here as evidence that a requirement has been met. The frameworks named are pointers to where the equivalent control is written down, not claims of conformity.
It also runs one way. Knowing that a handover certificate is a custody transfer control does not mean a logistician can walk into an internal audit function, any more than an auditor could run a stores account. What it means is that the underlying reasoning transfers, and that the training gap is usually narrower than either side assumes.
A caution applies to my own argument: naming a control is no evidence that it worked, and a record can differ from the reality it describes. The table helps someone ask better questions about their own experience and gives no licence to assert more.
Scope, scale, complexity, decision-making authority and consequence of failure. Not the job title, and not the course attended. What the accountability was, and what happened if it went wrong.
Map that against a published standard, control model or competency framework. The right column is a starting set. The point is to find the language the target sector already uses, not to adopt mine.
Identify the gaps that are real, as opposed to gaps in vocabulary, and close those. A qualification should open a door. It should not shrink the room behind it.