Abstract: Employment of ex-Service personnel remains one of the principle challenges for all organisations looking to ensure that ex-Service personnel and their families can build successful civilian lives. But the world of work is changing faster than ever before. The types of jobs available as well as the skills needed to do them are changing faster than many people can keep up with. Combined with effects of an ageing workforce, automation, a growing skills shortage and the impacts of the UK’s exit from the EU, navigating the UK jobs market is as difficult and confusing as it has ever been. Despite UK unemployment being at its lowest rate in decades, ex-Service personnel continue to experience barriers to finding good work. Research suggests employers still don’t sufficiently understand or appreciate the skills ex-Service personnel have to offer, which has a significant and negative impact on the types of roles they are considered for. In addition, underemployment in the UK is an increasing concern across the labour market. Office for National Statistics research suggests the percentage of workers who want more hours, or workers who want better jobs, is nearly double the unemployment rate, at about 9.7%, or 3.3 million people. This report therefore aims to investigate how this trend extends to the ex-Service community. Coupled with this, the volume of employers actively engaging with ex-Service employment support providers is still relatively low, reducing choice and opportunity for ex-Service personnel, and reducing the likelihood of a ‘best fit’ match for employers. This is particularly evident with the 5.8m SMEs, who represent 99% of UK companies but are failing to engage and employ ex-Service personnel at scale. This context reflects a dual challenge: • The lack of understanding and appreciation of the transferable skills, competencies and experience from the military by employers • The difficulty of employers, particularly SMEs, in accessing the ex-Service talent pool Taken together and in an increasingly uncertain labour market, these factors create the potential for ex-Service personnel to miss out on careers that are resilient, motivating, lucrative, offer development and make the most of their valuable skill sets. GoodPeople was therefore commissioned by Forces in Mind Trust (FiMT) to better investigate these trends and look at possible collaborative solutions. The aim of this report was to evaluate skills transfer and employment access barriers between the ex-Service community and SMEs and explore systemic opportunities to overcome these barriers through innovation and collaboration.
Abstract: One of the key achievements of Forces in Mind Trust’s (FiMT) Our Community - Our Covenant series of reports, beginning in 2016, has been to establish a toolkit for local authorities to help them develop support for their local Armed Forces Community (AFC). The 2016 report launched the idea of a “core infrastructure”, supported by self-assessment questions and some wider tips. Formal research and informal engagement show that the toolkit still provides an important contribution to successful local delivery of Covenant pledges and wider AFC support. It’s a baseline in the face of ever-present funding stresses and a point of reference when there are changes in member and officer responsibilities. This means it is important that the toolkit remains up to date. It was last reviewed in 2022 and presented as an Annex to FiMT’s research report A Decade of the Covenant. Since then, there has been further research into local support for the Armed Forces Community for the next iteration of the Our Community - Our Covenant series. This updated toolkit reflects these recent findings about local practice as well as developments following the introduction in the Armed Forces Act 2021 of the duty of due regard to the principles of the Covenant in the focus areas of housing, education and healthcare. As with the original document, the toolkit remains targeted at local authorities. It covers their own direct role in supporting the local AFC, but also the crucial activity of convening local partnerships and so enabling effective local collaborative action. The key changes to the core infrastructure and self-assessment cover: (1) More emphasis on embedding AFC support into the mainstream of local authority work. (2) An extended top tips section with more advice based on recent research. (3) We have dropped the descriptive scenarios of challenges that members of the AFC face. These have now been overtaken by analytical scenarios included in the freely available national training material and in the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) Covenant Legal Duty toolkit, which helps to explain the legal duty aspect of the Covenant. (4) Some additional material about the individual roles, collaboration, communication and vision and commitment elements of the core infrastructure. This toolkit update is being made in spring 2025 at a time when further change in the Covenant environment is likely, with potential extension of the Covenant duty and expected re-organisation in English local government and creation of new combined or strategic authorities. Additional modules could be added to the toolkit to reflect these ongoing policy developments.