Rising Above the Rest of your peers - Promotion on Re-entry to the RAF

The Royal Air Force has recently publicised the details of its scheme designed to attract former service members to re-join the RAF. The scheme is intended to provide an opportunity for people who have left to consider applying to re-enter the military and resume their career. (Full details can be found HERE).

To some serving personnel the process is controversial since rejoiners can be considered for promotion into a higher rank, depending on the experience they have accrued while outside. To some this is seen as ‘an insult’ to serving personnel in that it rewards those who have left, while not addressing the root cause of what is causing people to leave in the first place. To Humphrey this scheme is a very welcome and common sense idea that has the potential to bring a real infusion of people back into the system to fill gaps which would otherwise be empty.

The reality of life is that everyone who joins the armed forces will one day leave or retire. The career model for decades has been based on the notion of joining aged about 16-20 and then serving a full career of about 22 years or to 55 depending on your service. Should you choose to leave before this point, then there is usually no easy way back in – to the extent that Humphrey has met naval officers who have passed out of BRNC Dartmouth twice because they were made to redo the AIB when rejoining the Service a few years after leaving.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

While attrition is expected and inevitable (and is reflected in part in the thinning of posts at more senior levels as manpower numbers drop), there is still a problem with too many people leaving at the wrong points, for example a high outflow of JNCO’s – causing not only gaps in that rank, but then creating a ‘black hole’ of manpower shortages that will take years to work through the system.

The lack of direct entry means that should a Flight Sergeant with 15 years’ experience leave, then the only real way to replace them is to recruit someone and wait many years for them to be promoted to the same rank and be appointable to fill those SNCO posts.

The challenge is particularly pronounced because the armed forces are not a homogenous block of people. There may be (for example) 2000 Chief Petty Officers in the Royal Navy, but that doesn’t mean you can appoint them interchangeably. A CPO Logistician in the Fleet Air Arm is not realistically able to do the job of a CPO Nuclear Watchkeeper on a submarine. With an enormous range of trades and specialisations in the system, the numbers of personnel in any branch is often relatively small, along with the career opportunities.

If people leave early, the posts still need to be filled, meaning that hard pressed areas (for example nuclear engineers) will see people posted to the operationally essential roles like being at sea, and get far less downtime on other less intense roles, such as working ashore. If a branch has a plot of 40 SNCO posts and only 25 personnel qualified to fill it, then the pressure on those 25 will be ridiculous and cause a cycle of further retention challenges.

People leave for different reasons – many have tired of the peculiar demands of the military lifestyle, while others want more certainty in their career postings. Family demands such as school needs or caregiving responsibilities may force someone to leave to be in a specific geographic area, or people just want a change in circumstances. Some leave because the relentless pace of operational deployments has exhausted them and is causing family rifts. Others leave because having done an operational tour, life in barracks and exercises holds no appeal at all. There is no coherent rhyme or reason why people walk away and it is impossible to create a package of retention measures that will address all of these concerns.

The move to consider re-entry then is important because it recognises two things. Firstly that people who leave may want to come back in at a later date when their life circumstances make it possible to do so.  Secondly, that the system is recognising that in some specific cases they have gained relevant experience that warrants recognition, and in turn could help solve wider manpower problems.

Some service personnel are unhappy at the concept that you can leave and come back in at a higher rank. But the flip side of this is that this is not going to apply to everyone – it is likely that a tiny percentage of overall applicants will enter in a higher rank. It is worth noting that there is no guarantee of being accepted back into the Service, just because you have served does not give you an automatic right of re-entry.

If you have spent your time away from the Service in certain roles that mirrored your military career, then it is possible your skill set has advanced considerably in the intervening time. For instance an aircraft engineer who leaves, then immediately spends the next five years working in progressively more senior engineering roles, taking on wider financial and leadership responsibility is a good example of someone who may warrant promotion – take the experience they have gained, recognise it and reward it. But, someone who leaves the Air Force as a policeman but then spends the next five years working as a chef is unlikely to get the same result.

At its heart what this is about is intelligent management of talent. The military are dreadful about clinging to process and time served over common sense when it comes to recognizing and rewarding talent. The public and private sector generally excel at taking really good people and giving them the opportunity to show what they can do and promote them accordingly. Olly Robbins, who is leading the Civil Service Brexit negotiations for the UK on behalf of HMG is 43 – in the Army he’d likely be a senior Major or Lt Colonel at best.

What is needed is an approach that recognises that people leave, but that walking away does not mean leaving the life forever. It means that people want or need time away from the military, but that they can still offer much to it later in their life. By offering a way back in the military not only get talent back to fill gapped posts and improve the manpower situation, but also encourage an inflow of new ideas and fresh thinking.

Some people worry that promoting people in will merely damage their own promotion prospects. This is unlikely to be the case – again, using the example of a branch with a requirement for 40 people at a certain rank and only 25 in it, there are 15 slots in that rank bracket that need to be filled. You can’t promote more junior people early as they probably don’t have the training and qualification for it (and this in turn merely shoves the problem down a level, putting 15 additional gaps in the rank belows plot). Bringing people back in on promotion is about putting people with the right relevant experience in to fill gaps that the military has not been able to fill internally – not deny existing personnel the right to promotion as a result.

The only point when promotion may slow is if the branch becomes fully manned again. If you have a branch with 40 at one rank, needing to promote people to fill the next rank that needs 10 people, then with only 25 in the branch, the perception of ‘easy’ promotion exists, simply because there is a small pool to draw on. But, if you have 40 people to promote from, it will seem harder to promote. This is as it should be – people will have just gotten used to the promotion seeming easier because there are fewer of them – they are instead going to have to adjust to the reality of a properly manned branch again.

The armed forces have spent generations preparing their personnel to leave through the resettlement process and encouraging them to go and join organisations where they usually have zero prior internal experience, often in senior jobs. Is it so unreasonable to expect a similar reverse process where people with prior internal experience return with additional experience and are recognised for having done so?

There is undoubtedly going to be some resentment of the fact that the military is recognising external skills and ‘rewarding’ what some may deem to be ‘failures’ who left and came back. But this is no different to how the private sector works – to fill skills gaps in your workforce you need to entice the right candidates to join it. We should be wary of the dangerous attitude of the Armed Forces ‘lifer’ for whom the outside world is a scary and dangerous place, and where change is to be burned with fire and not embraced. To them people who have left their world except by retirement or medical discharge should be banished and cast out, never to be let back in. These people occupy many roles across the military and their negative attitude is in part often a cause in why others leave.

These changes are a vital part of the transition of the armed forces employment model to one that better reflects the reality of 21^st century work. Initiatives like this, coupled with ideas like flexible working, career breaks and seamless transfer between regular and reserve forces are all critical to help provide a model of opportunities that align with how other good employers treat their staff.

While the armed forces will always have unique aspects to their work, they have to accept that as recruiters they are in a major battle for talent to recruit and retain engineers, medics and cyber personnel, and other individuals with very niche skills.  Moves like this, and re-entry are critical tools to help keep the workforce manned with the right people at the right level of experience.

In time perhaps we need to reassess the entire Armed Forces ‘offer’ and ask whether the current career model of identical benefits is right, or if a complete revolution is needed to instead look at allowing personnel to choose the compensation package and benefits that are right for them – e.g. take the full capitation costs of someone (salary, allowances, pension, housing etc) and allow them to decide how they want it allocated.

For instance, would it be better to provide an offer to a junior 18yr old soldier of a package involving barracks accommodation, no education allowances or married quarters or pension beyond statutory minimum, but a very large cash salary? Or offer a graduate a package with a smaller salary, but matching contributions to paying off student loans, that would mean after 12 years service (e.g. initial engagement) they are debt free? Finally offer an officer with children more in the way of support for education, or savings boosts if they save for their childrens university costs?

This is all total blue sky thinking, but its an example of how perhaps by having an entirely fresh discussion about how the military recruit, compensate and retain their people, we can completely change the challenge of both recruiting and retention for the better.