Joe Dodd, Landlord of the Sportsman’s Arms, Warrington (pictured)
“I’d felt safer in Basra than I did on that first night of running the pub”
My last job in the Army was as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, sat behind a desk in Glasgow, but I’ve been all over the world. I was in the Army for 29 years – from the age of 16 – and have been everywhere from Kosovo to Iraq to Northern Ireland.
I started to think about leaving last year, as I was getting fed up with the constant separation from my wife. I still had another seven years to go, but I didn’t want to live in the mindset where the family is constantly second.
Leaving was also triggered by a pub coming up for sale in Warrington, near where I’ve had a house for 20 years. I fancied taking it over, but I didn’t rush into buying it. I researched the market and employed business consultants to value the business. I got some pub landlord training too before I made the guy
an offer.
If anyone is thinking of doing something like this, then they can come and see me. I’d be happy to tell them what I know. Some breweries offer attachments – I did mine through Marston’s, they run a ‘learn the trade’ course over a week.
It has been a good investment. The business is worth two to three times what I paid for it now. It’s a restaurant-cum-community pub. It’s a fair old size as it’s an 18th century building with large gardens at the back that I’m going to develop later this year. It’s a bit overgrown now, but it will become a beer garden. It’s the pubs that only sell beer that are struggling – you need the income from food to survive. There’s a limited profit in beer and spirits – you have to do more – so we put music on and have a quiz night.
My advice to anyone doing something like this is to research the market and get financial advice. We are a little bit cocooned as soldiers, we’re not businessmen. I’m lucky in that I have a financial background – I was in the Pay Corps for a while and have qualifications from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, so I can speak the lingo of these business consultants.
But I’d felt safer in Basra than I did on that first night of running the pub. You really do need to know your customer, they love it if you know their name, and can say hello/goodbye to them. Mind you, they’ve only got mine and my wife’s names to remember, not a whole pub full!
The discipline from my military background certainly helps with customers – people have a lot of respect for the military – but more than anything, it’s the interpersonal skills. I’ve got a really broad range of customers, doctors, lawyers, bin men and even bin women. Then there are 18-year-olds, and a 91-year-old couple who come in for a drink every day.
I have found it quite easy to adjust. It’s nice to be able to relax, rather than have to disappear off somewhere every five minutes.
Angela Owen
Principal Consultant,
PA Consulting Group
“I really miss my boots!”
Being Chief G1 in Northern Ireland was roughly equivalent to being the Head of HR for the Army based over there. It came at a fascinating time as we were just moving away from being an operational theatre. My job was to oversee the people aspects. It was incredibly busy with an awful lot of change management, but it was an historic time to be there.
I’d joined the Army straight from school. When I left last year, after 23 years, I was a Lieutenant Colonel. I’d joined up because I wanted to travel the world and do something that made a difference. I really adored my time in the Army, I’ve no regrets and I travelled widely, but eventually I came to the realisation that it was time to go. I wanted to do something else in life. I wanted new challenges.
My initial idea was to go into finance as I’m a qualified accountant. But when I went on the career transition workshop that’s run across the military, they suggested I think about consultancy, as so many skills I’d picked up were transferable. I’m now at PA Consulting Group, which is a leading management, systems and technology consulting firm. PA is an employee-owned organisation, with around 3,000 people and offices around the world. PA works in both the public and private sectors; more specifically, PA has been working with the defence community for more than 60 years, on key challenges covering policy, strategy and change implementation.
I’ve been here for a few months now, and have had lots of training, but they really do get you out and about – adding value instantly. I was sent out to a client assignment on my third day. So far, I’ve been on a project involving HR transformation in the defence and security sector, but I will get variety of assignments.
I’d say the most difficult thing about moving to civilian life has been to stop using military terminology. You find yourself wanting to say ‘order of march’ then have to stop to work out how to translate it. There are similarities between the culture at PA and in the military, so I’ve found it an easy transition. For example, PA is about ethics and values – about doing the right thing. It’s also a genuine meritocracy, and focuses on delivery for its clients, also like the military. Less similarly, but what I also very much like, is that the most junior consultant can challenge me if they don’t agree with what I’m saying.
Do I miss anything? Yes, I miss my boots! They were incredibly comfortable, but I couldn’t wear them with a skirt. I miss certain individuals in the Army too – there are some I’ve known for a very long time, but you get a very similar sense of camaraderie here with the team too, especially when you’re out on assignment.
David Goddard, Bridge Simulator Manager
at HMS Collingwood, VT Flagship
“I had as smooth a transition as anyone could hope for”
Normally, Navy personnel retire at 50, but I retired at 51 last June as a Lieutenant Commander, after 33 years. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go far. The job I was doing as Bridge Simulator Manager was transferred from the Navy to VT Flagship, the Royal Navy’s commercial training partner. So I’m in very much the same role, although I have acquired a number of extra management responsibilities.
Day-to-day, my job is broadly the same as before, the biggest change is that now I am responsible for 30 people.
That takes up a fair amount of time. Obviously, you’ve got to
be monitoring progress, checking things are being done correctly and answering questions, but the primary job still remains very much as it was. I monitor the running of the simulator, teach and assess
people for qualifications.
The easiest part of my transition was that it’s the same core role –
it’s acquiring knowledge about the people you are responsible for that takes time to get to grips with. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just new, so you need to learn a new method to deal with it.
When you get to the age I was when I retired, you feel like you’ve done everything you wanted and expected to do in the military, so I was ready to move on. Fortunately, the military is, by and large, about dealing with people. It’s skills you can apply in the outside world, although you need to discuss and motivate rather than just rely on your military rank and status.
I’ve found that the military gives you an inner resilience and sense of direction, and hopefully an ability to plan. This transfers well into business because a lot of it is about recognising an opportunity and thinking how are you going to take it.
My advice to new leavers is to first take stock of skills they’ve acquired over the years and recognise how they can strengthen those and then take a look around to decide what type of career they want to follow – do I want to work for myself, do I want to work in a company, do I want to carry on in the same sort of field, or do I want a complete break and of course other issues such as – where do I want to work, geographically?
I had as smooth a transition as anyone could hope for but it’s still a step into the unknown. But if you take a look at your military career I think you’ll find that there are actually a lot of positives that you can take from it and transfer outside, certainly a lot of management skills and personal skills.
As long as you take responsibility for what you’re doing you’ll find a
lot of companies will be pleased to take you on.
Ed Janvrin, Associate,
PricewaterhouseCoopers
“One of my soldiers was killed a few days ago. To know that this is happening while I’m sat in an office is hard to take”
I was in the Army for seven years and had an amazing time, it completely blew every expectation. I spent time with the Gurkhas in Brunei and I went to Iraq with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. In 2004, I went off to France (my mother is French) to be a liaison officer with a French unit. Then I went back to the Gurkhas in Afghanistan.
That was my first taste of bombs. I had more in 2006 when I joined the Grenadiers who were then ramping up to go to Afghanistan. I ended up as a Major, mentoring an Afghan Major in charge of more than 100 Afghan troops.
But I left the Army in March last year and joined PricewaterhouseCoopers in August. It became a natural time to leave. I realised that the Army wasn’t going to give me the jobs I wanted through my 30s and 40s – I’d have had to go through the tedium of staff jobs. I’d always been interested in politics and what’s going on globally, as it’s the business environment that makes a difference in all the poor countries that I’ve been to.
I had Army friends who joined Ernst & Young, so I knew a bit about working for City firms and had an idea of what I wanted, but it only became clear later. So my obvious tip is that you have to network. The more contacts you can lay your hands on the better.
My role is a relatively junior one. I have to support the Project Manager on a transformation project at a big energy company. There are lots of parallels to military life, but some things are very different. The knowledge element is completely new. But, in terms of the skills required, there are a lot of similarities. After all, I was effectively a consultant to the Afghan army. It’s a case of building up the trust so that people will listen to what I suggest.
I have lots of project-management, people-management and change-management skills, but people have very little understanding of what I’ve done, so they have no realisation of my experience when I make suggestions. Getting that faith is my current challenge.
If I miss anything – then without a shadow of a doubt I miss having my best friends around me all the time. My old Regiment is out in Afghanistan and having quite a hard time of it. It’s very hard to be sat in an office in front of a computer screen knowing what they’re going through. One of my soldiers was killed just a few days ago. To know that this is happening while I’m in an office is hard to take.
Ryan Kelly, unemployed and living in Spain
“It was all going to plan until the world economy took a big nosedive into financial crisis just as I left the Army…”
I spent 22 years in REME and I left last autumn. I was a Vehicle Mechanic and was a Sergeant. I’d served in Iraq, Northern Ireland and Bosnia. I was living in Germany just before I left.
I could have stayed on, but the way things were changing, I didn’t really want to. It was never the same after they introduced the Options for Change programme in 1990. The Army became overly-focused on health and safety.
Don’t get me wrong, health and safety is a good thing, but it becomes a hindrance in doing the job. It became so over-emphasised that you couldn’t do anything without filling in a form. It makes you wonder how you’d ever go to war.
I did enjoy my time in the Army – for a lot of people, it’s a very good place to go. There’s no other job that’s going to give you the constant wage, look after you with housing if you’re married, the medical service...
It’s a fantastic career opportunity. But my wife and I had bought a house in Spain a few years ago. She’d worked there before, enjoyed the country and the people. We were thinking this was where we were going to settle down.
It was all going to plan until the world economy took a big nosedive into financial crisis just as I left the Army. The unemployment rate shot up in Spain just as I got here.
It’s knocked me for six. I’m living off my savings at the moment. I’ve got 22 years’ experience as a mechanic and I’ve had a lot of advertising material created as a mobile mechanic, but it’s very tough.
My other option is to move to the Czech Republic – that’s where my wife is from and we may have to cut our losses before it gets too dire and mark this down as an experience that didn’t work out.
If anyone is reading this and about to leave the Army – I’d advise them to get their networking sorted. I was unlucky in that the financial crisis hit just as I came out here. If it hadn’t been for that it could have been a different story.
I’ve sent CVs to a lot of places in the Czech Republic and I’m starting to get a positive response. It’s not perhaps where I want to be right now, but there’s no point getting depressed about anything, you’ve just got to get on with life. I’m very positive about the future.
Regional Surf Development Coach, British Surfing Association
“I’m very aware that it’s a bit of a glamour role”
Andy Sturt
Regional Surf Development Coach, British Surfing Association
“I’m very aware
that it’s a bit of a glamour role”
I was in the RAF for 23 years as an Airframe Technician and finished with the rank of Sergeant. I started my career working on Hawk aircraft, then Hercules, then moved to the RAF Centre of Aviation Medicine at Henlow. While I was there I was working with hyperbaric chambers doing experimental work with hypoxia, or altitude sickness.
On my last tour, I brought my family back down to St Mawgan in Cornwall near where I grew up. My wife and I used to see the kids hanging around bus stops in and around the provincial towns where we’d lived before and it wasn’t what we wanted for our children. We grew up in Cornwall and had a great time growing up on the beaches.
I was fortunate at first to get a job with a travel company looking after French students coming to the UK. It was a brilliant job until the point where the children arrived. Then it became a nightmare. I went from being a Logistics Manager to being a Social Care Manager.
I did it for a while, but then I saw that the British Surf Association was looking for a Regional Development Coach. In the RAF, I’d been heavily involved with the RAF Wave Riders Association. Through them I’d gained coaching qualifications and my life-guard award. I used to organise all their beginners courses too.
So my new job is a broadly similar role to the one I had in the RAF, but on a much bigger scale. It’s an initiative for the development of club- and coach-coaching within the South West. The role has ballooned since I started too, as the Government has put extra funding in to involve local schools in surfing. It’s all about getting schools to form clubs, then form links with surf clubs and so on.
You could say that my work with the French kids has come in useful. I’d like to think that I’m roughly in tune with younger people. I’ve always maintained that slightly immature edge so I can understand where they’re coming from.
I do miss being part of a big team – all the banter and one-liners. Here, in a small company, it’s a much quieter environment, more subdued, so I miss the vibrant atmosphere I used to have.
But going back to my roots is very satisfying. I grew up in Newquay and always spent a lot of time surfing. It’s a career that’s also my lifestyle, so I’m very privileged. I work down at Fistral beach, which is a bit of a hub for British surfing. I’m very aware it’s a bit of a glamour role. It’s a great job.
Civvy Street: how the Legion can lend a hand
Civvy Street (
www.civvystreet.org) is funded by The Royal British Legion and has been developed to support service leavers, members of the ex-Services community (including Reservists) and their dependants. The website provides assistance with learning and work issues in civilian life and help with resettlement issues. It provides a comprehensive range of information, advice, online services and tools as well as access to funding and support schemes including the Legion Training Grant and Bursary Award scheme.
The aim is to help users develop their skills and get into work.
Civvy Street works in partnership with other organisations working for the benefit of the ex-service community. A membership section on the site gives practitioners and member organisations access to resources and programmes aimed at continuous professional development and quality improvement. The Civvy Street Partnership includes CTP, SSAFA, RFEA and many others.
In 2009, Civvy Street launches a new employment and recruitment service to provide information on careers and job opportunities across various industry sectors to users. It also provides employers and industry bodies with the ability to post job vacancies and interact with members, for example through online employer fairs.
Civvy Street attracts thousands of visitors every month and has more than 5,000 registered members.
