Veterans work | Recognising the potential of ex-service personnel
Executive summary
Why is it important that veterans work?
Around 16,000 men and women leave the UK’s armed forces each year, joining a population of 2.6 million military veterans and 35,000 volunteer reserves in ‘civvy street’. Official statistics show that the majority of veterans transition successfully into employment after leaving the armed forces. But many veterans and reservists continue to be stereotyped or employers fail to recognise the transferable skills they’ve acquired during their service careers, such as communication skills, leadership, teamwork, social perceptiveness, flexibility, creative problem-solving, judgement and decision-making. As a consequence, a high proportion of veterans work in low-paid, routine jobs or choose instead to enter the skilled trades, employed as builders, plumbers, electricians and technicians, where the military’s vocational training is more easily translated. Now, though, Deloitte research shows that changes in the nature of work – driven by continuing advances in technologies such as robotics, big data and artificial intelligence – are making these transferable skills critically important to the UK’s economy. So the big question is this: can employing veterans and reservists be good for society and business? This new study sets out to find an answer to this question. Using a combination of data analysis, surveys and interviews, we show that employers who go out of their way to hire veterans are already realising commercial benefits. However, despite positive sentiment from the majority of medium and large organisations, there is a persistent lack of understanding of the key skills that veterans possess as well as seemingly high barriers to employment in the first place.
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Our main findings •• Organisations that have employed veterans are very positive about the value they bring: 72 per cent of organisations with active ex-military recruitment programmes would definitely recommend employing veterans (giving a score of 10/10) and 80 per cent say they understand how military skills fit in with their organisation’s needs. •• Organisations that have employed veterans see them not just as holding a few specialist skills but, crucially, as performing well across a range of areas: around 90 per cent of organisations that go out of their way to employ veterans see them as performing well in 20 of the 25 skill areas we examined in our research. Veterans were seen as being particularly strong in areas relating to communication, planning and time management, team-working, leading and inspiring others, and being able to pick up specialist knowledge and solve problems. •• More than half (53 per cent) of organisations that have employed veterans say they tend to be promoted more quickly than their workforce in general: our survey findings are also supported, to some degree, by evidence that veterans are able to move ‘up’ through occupational classifications over time to take on jobs that place greater importance on cognitive and soft skills rather than just technical or basic skills. •• Many of the skills that veterans possess are in areas where organisations are experiencing gaps: for instance, around a third of the medium and large organisations we surveyed have skills gaps in strategic management, managing and motivating staff, team-working, positive attitude and listening skills. These are all areas where veterans are seen as performing well by around 90 per cent of organisations that have employed them.
