July marks the mid-year point for the Career Transition Partnership (CTP) employment fairs taking place across the UK. As our recruitment colleagues have been finding out, they’re a great way to meet Armed Forces service leavers with a wealth of transferable skills and engineering knowledge – with 2024 events already welcoming over 1,500 attendees.
Who are the Career Transition Partnership?
It’s the official resettlement programme for the Ministry of Defence, helping Armed Forces personnel find rewarding careers as they transition back to civilian lives.
The Career Transition Partnership provide a wide range of support, including training courses and a job board, that people can search to look for suitable roles.
Regional employment fairs are hosted across the UK, to give people a chance to meet businesses like NRL who are keen to help them find the right roles for their skillset. From Edinburgh to Bournemouth, our recruitment branches have set up our exhibition stand to meet service leavers and offer job support and advice.
We reflect on the past six months and what we’ve learnt so far.
People love our pink branding
We couldn’t start the list without mentioning the overwhelmingly positive feedback we get at each employment fair about our striking pink branding. Stand visitors love how bright and vibrant our pink merchandise is, and how much it stands out across the room.
Most importantly though we’ve discovered that it provides a great icebreaker and talking point, especially when you walk into a room packed with companies interested in telling you about their business and what career opportunities are available. It can be a little overwhelming if you’ve not attended an event like it before, so a little small talk about how pink our water bottles are helps to initiate the conversation.
Navigating the next chapter isn’t straightforward
During a career in the Armed Forces, you develop a wide range of skills, and job remits are often very broad filled with different experiences. This can make it difficult to decide which sector would suit you best, or which job discipline you’d like to work in when you prepare to leave.
The employment fairs are a great opportunity to chat with prospective employers and discuss options, as there’s no commitment to sign up for a job on the day. Instead, you can chat about what you enjoy doing most and businesses can tell you more about what the various jobs entail to see if any sound of interest.
During conversations with visitors to NRL’s stand we’ve found that people are opening to investigate a wide range of sectors, perhaps even some that they hadn’t initially considered. Taking this approach can help you to discover a new career that you may not have been noticed when scrolling through job boards, so we’d encourage anyone preparing to leave the Armed Forces to register to attend a nearby event.
LinkedIn is a powerful networking tool
Chatting with delegates at the events, we quickly realised that lots of Armed Forces personnel would benefit from joining LinkedIn to help with the search for a civilian role. Job seekers can follow the companies they meet at the CTP events and connect with exhibitors, as well as looking up previous colleagues who have secured work in the private sector to reconnect with them.
It’s important to build up a support network, which will help to discover available roles and companies often advertise jobs directly on LinkedIn.
Our recruiters are more than happy to connect with service leavers on LinkedIn as they look to grow their social network, and you can meet our team here.
NRL’s Social Media Marketing Manager Jamie Finn also shared blog articles earlier in the year, helping service leavers to set-up their LinkedIn profiles and best use the social networking site. You can read these here.
Contracting roles provide a great opportunity to build a portfolio
When you’re unsure of the sector or role you want to work in when you leave the Armed Forces, the next step in your career doesn’t necessarily need to be a long-term permanent position. Instead, our recruiters have been discussing the benefits of contracting with service leavers, and how temporary work can build up a portfolio of engineering project experience in a relatively short space of time.
If you’ve no fixed requirement on where you’ll live when you depart, contracting can also provide the opportunity to travel and see the world – whether that’s working on projects across the UK or overseas. You’ll also benefit from growing your network further, working with different clients and colleagues who you can connect with on LinkedIn and save their phone number, to reach out to at a later date to enquire about work. Contracting provides a great way to boost your Armed Forces resume, and our recruitment teams are always happy to chat to service leavers about suitable projects we could put them forward for.
An Armed Forces career is extremely valuable
Finally, the overwhelming feedback we’ve had from branches after exhibiting at the Career Transition Partnership employment fairs is the number of skills and experienced people they meet. They arrive back in their branch buzzing to tell colleagues about the people they’ve chatted to and can’t wait to pick up the phone to our clients to share information about candidates who’d be an ideal fit for their roles.
As a signatory of the Armed Forces Covenant and recent recipient of the Employer Recognition Scheme Silver Award, we’re committed to helping as many Armed Forces families as possible find rewarding careers, and with the help of the Career Transition Partnership we’re able to meet thousands of fantastic people to lend our support as they navigate the next stage of their life. We look forward to the next six months of busy employment fairs and meeting even more people looking for engineering careers.