Talent Should Flow Both Ways

The Strategic Defence Review commits Defence to growing the Reserves by 20% when funding allows (Strategic Defence Review, 2025), and an expanding industrial base needs staffing. Experienced professionals who join still tend to enter at the bottom. The Ministry of Defence is already piloting an alternative, although it has so far attracted little attention. Discussion of the Pan-Defence Skills Framework, including this site's own Recognition Before Retraining, has focused mainly on helping people leave well. This essay takes the reverse question: how experienced people might be brought in. It also asks how they might move between the Ministry of Defence, the defence industry and the Reserves without each move being treated as a fresh start.

The driver

The 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy commits £182 million to strengthen the future skills of the workforce. It states that Government will make it easier and faster for members of the Armed Forces and workers in other industries to move into the defence sector. It also commits to making it easier to transfer into and across defence mid-career by scoping the development of a Defence Skills Passport. That passport is intended to build on the Ministry of Defence's industry-benchmarked Pan-Defence skills work and on ZigZag Careers. It would create a digital record of an individual's skills, enabling smoother identification and transfer between the Armed Forces, defence industry and those looking to enter from neighbouring industries.

Regular Armed Forces numbers have declined by 8% since 2022. Shortages now affect military, civil service and industrial roles across manufacturing, engineering and advanced technology, and Defence supports over 239,000 jobs (Strategic Defence Review, 2025). The Strategic Defence Review also commits to boosting Reserve numbers by 20% when funding allows, alongside a whole force, skills-based approach. Defence is therefore unlikely to expand the Reserves by a fifth and staff a growing industrial base while insisting that experienced professionals begin at the bottom of a rank ladder.

The mechanism

The Pan-Defence Skills Framework is shifting Defence's focus from rank to skills (Forces News, 2026). Designed as a Whole Force approach covering Regulars, Reservists and civil servants, it gives Defence a single common language for skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, with individual validated skills profiles held digitally.

The first feature that matters for talent mobility is the capture of skills acquired outside Defence. Personnel are encouraged to log capability from their civilian lives, from language proficiency to professional qualifications, which was previously either passed on by word of mouth or lost. Senior officers leading the rollout have highlighted Reservists in particular, noting that they hold a wealth of experience from outside Defence that is potentially very valuable. That capture can turn tacit knowledge nobody officially tracked into a searchable record the whole enterprise can draw on.

The second is that the framework decouples capability from rank as the primary organising principle. Defence has openly discussed employing people according to the skillset required, without treating rank as a proxy for what someone can do. This is the foundation for lateral entry, since someone with the right expertise would no longer need to hold the rank a role was historically built around before being considered for it. Without that shift, capturing outside skills in a database would change little, because rank would still gate who gets to use them.

It is already being piloted

The Ministry of Defence's ZigZag Career Pathway is a skills-focused pilot. It is designed to bring talented professionals into the Armed Forces in fixed-term roles that match their expertise, explicitly breaking away from the conventional military career ladder. It is open to civilians with no prior service, to returning veterans and to Reservists seeking a more flexible contribution, with minimal military training and a tailored induction. For veterans and current reservists, the pathway offers roles that reflect "industry experience rather than previous rank", so that individuals can re-engage at an appropriate level. Advertised ZigZag roles have included cyber threat intelligence and digital support posts at specified grades, so capability-based entry exists in practice as well as on paper.

The strategic case for making this systematic

The Defence workforce is under sustained pressure from skills shortages (Policy Connect, 2025; Skills England, 2025), and treated as an enterprise-wide talent market the framework could relieve part of that pressure. Cyber, data, AI assurance, systems engineering, nuclear skills, trade compliance and complex programme delivery are contested across the whole economy. Sourcing a mid-career specialist through a Reserve or fixed-term route is likely to be faster than training one for a decade.

A defence prime reading a Service CV has to interpret it. A validated, industry-benchmarked skills record could remove that friction and reduce the risk premium employers apply to military candidates, since the framework would already have done the vouching. Retention may improve as well, because people are more likely to stay in an enterprise where they can move without penalty than one where every transition costs them status. A skills passport could make a career that moves between the Ministry of Defence, industry and the Reserves a rational choice. That bears directly on the 20% Reserve target, by removing one reason people leave and do not return.

Someone who has operated first-line controls inside Defence, then worked in commercial supply chain governance or export control, and then returned as a Reservist, would understand both the regulator's expectation and the operator's reality. That combination is rare, and it is increasingly valuable given the enforcement risk now attached to export control and supply chain compliance in the sector. Skills held by one organisation and invisible to the rest of the enterprise also behave like single points of failure. A framework that makes them visible across the Ministry of Defence, industry and the Reserves could turn that fragility into shared capacity.

What needs to be true for this to work

The Defence Skills Passport is to be scoped through an initial framework, operating concept and pilot opportunities, developed in sector-wide consultation supported by industry early adopters (Defence Industrial Strategy, 2025). Scoping is a reasonable start, and the value would appear only once industry recognises the record as authoritative.

Professional registration, security clearance, competence assurance and safety qualification requirements exist for good reasons and would need to be met in full. The argument is narrower: prior demonstrated capability should be assessed before anyone is treated as a beginner, with assessment before entry and no exemption from entry requirements. Sequenced that way, capability-based entry broadens the pipeline and keeps the bar where it is. Conflating the two is one reason people may distrust capability-based entry. Recognition of prior capability is, in my view, a matter of accuracy, crediting what someone can already demonstrably do. An attempt at that accuracy, mapping published Royal Navy role descriptions against civilian control frameworks, is set out in Independently Verified Skills Mapping. It is the same exercise a Defence Skills Passport would need to run at scale for every trade.

The question to ask

Can Defence grow the Reserves by a fifth and staff an expanding industrial base while experienced professionals still tend to enter at the bottom? On the evidence so far, the answer is probably no, unless the pieces Defence has already built are joined up. The Pan-Defence Skills Framework, the ZigZag pilot and the proposed Defence Skills Passport are three parts of the same answer. They are currently held in different places, owned by different parts of the enterprise and at different levels of maturity. Defence has historically asked what skills it needs and how to train them. The more useful question is how it makes skills visible, portable and recognisable as people move between Service, industry and the wider economy, in both directions and more than once. Joining the three up is a decision about whether Defence regards a career as a ladder or as a network, and a network looks more useful than a ladder that only runs one way. Defence is more likely to reverse the 8% decline and reach the 20% Reserve ambition by making it normal for talent to move in, out, sideways and back again. Each move would be treated as evidence of capability. Recruiting harder into the same rank-based entry point is the less promising route.

The views expressed here are my own and are based on general observations about Defence workforce policy, skills recognition and industrial strategy. 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.