INSPIRING THE NEXT GENERATION
and further interventions were rare,” says Turner. “What we’re talking about now is training people for the next job on a more continuous basis, which allows people to migrate across the employment fields within the service much more freely, because we haven’t committed someone wholly to one career stream. We can actually move people around between streams in an adaptable manner.”
“WE HAVE TO REFLECT MODERN EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES, ENGAGING FLEXIBLY WITH OUR PEOPLE” Turner sees this approach as giving personnel more flexibility in terms of manning the service, and making training more efficient because, as he puts it, “we can train just in time for the right thing, rather than early for everything, which is wasteful”. It will also give the individual recruit more control and flexibility. “The idea of a portfolio career in which one has various careers in one’s overall working life is something that we can now provide through the multiple strands of the RAF, and that’s where the Ministry of Defence wants to go in terms of engagement structures,” says Turner.
Developing the skills of RAF personnel for tasks as and when required results in greater efficiency
SGT MITCH MOORE / CROWN COPYRIGHT
a portfolio opportunity. We have to focus on that, because we already offer a fantastic portfolio career opportunity, but we need to present it in a way that grabs the imagination. We have to reflect modern employment practices, engaging flexibly with our people, in how we manage them and employ them. That will enable us to attract and retain the right kind of people, with the right skills for the right length of time.” Stubbs notes that a recruit can currently join either the full-time regulars or the part-time reserves and, at the moment, if a full-time commitment to the regulars is, or becomes, impractical, there is no halfway house. It is the reserves or nothing, which Stubbs says “loses valuable skills and talent”. This will change as the UK Armed Forces People Programme matures. Although the final detail is not yet decided, Stubbs envisages that “you might see a range of engagements from full-time through to part-time, both for regulars and reserves. So you might join and start a career as a regular with a full-time commitment and then, if you get married and have children, you might go on to a limited commitment, which means we don’t deploy you for a period of time; indeed, you might also drop down to a part-time arrangement and then, in mid life, return to a fuller commitment.” This shift in employment structures will have an impact on the approach to training. To enable this kind of flexible employment scheme, the RAF will need to engage in continuous education. “Thirty years ago, recruits were trained, sent off for work,
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