As defence cuts loom, more and more military personnel are eyeing corporate careers. How easy is it for ex-soldiers to make the switch?

Nick Everard is in for a busy year. As managing director of G1 Consulting, he specialises in finding jobs for ex-servicemen, and over the next 12 months there are likely to be more of them coming into the market than ever before.

Thanks to the Strategic Defence Review, 17,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen are being made redundant and they will be in addition to the thousands of military personnel who leave the forces every year. In the last financial year, 18,570 people quit, 1,890 of them officers, of whom 215 were women.

Many men and women from the ranks move into related areas such as the police force, the prison service and security companies, while corporals and sergeants (and their navy and air force equivalents) make highly effective team leaders in sectors such as transport (Royal Logistic Corps), telecoms (Royal Signals) and construction (Royal Engineers). Officers, meanwhile, often use their command-and-control experience to apply for jobs in large corporates. Some find positions in areas where their experience in the services would put them at an obvious advantage. Colin Wood, director of airside operations for British Airways, for example, is a former wing commander in the RAF.

Many others put themselves forward for management jobs for which a career in the army, navy or air force may not, at first sight, appear the best preparation. But Everard—a former lieutenant colonel in the 9th/12th Lancers—reckons there are many transferable skills. “A sustained operational deployment such as Iraq or Afghanistan requires far more than an effective combat capability,” he says. “Troops must be resupplied with food, ammunition, fuel, spares and water; equipment must be serviced; plans must be made to suit every contingency; communications must be established and maintained; roads and bridges must be repaired; and casualties must be treated and evacuated.

“The managerial, project management and vocational skills required are those needed in any business—with the added challenge that they must be reliably applied in circumstances that may be both physically demanding and potentially dangerous.”

He argues that life in the military creates “dynamic, flexible, task-oriented team players” who have experience of project management, strategic planning and, crucially, organisational leadership. Such candidates also tend to be well educated, having passed through one of three commissioning colleges used by the armed services—Sandhurst, Dartmouth or Cranwell. Large numbers are university graduates, too.

Many officers leave the forces after serving a short service commission, and are likely to be captains or junior majors (or their navy and air force equivalents) in their late twenties or early thirties. Others leave at 37, the lowest age at which a former serviceman or woman can draw on their pension. Even those who stay on have to quit at 55, the retirement age of all British military personnel. The City has long been an attractive option and Bart Cookson, a major in the Royal Tank regiment who quit the army a month before his 37th birthday, is one who has made his second career there.

“I had been sponsored by the army at school and I hadn’t given any thought to doing anything else,” he says. “I was intending to make my career of it and it was fascinating to see the change the army went through from being Cold War-focused to being heavily deployed on expeditionary operations. At the end I was working on defence acquisition and procurement and it was clear to me that there was going to be very little money for defence in the future. I could see the compromises we were considering making from an equipment point of view. It was becoming increasingly difficult, given the resource levels, for the army to do its job properly.

“Domestically, I was also ready for a change. When you’re young, free and single it’s fine to go on an operation for six months but there are additional pressures when you have a wife and three children.”

But it was Cookson’s assessment of promotion prospects that proved decisive. Thanks to being at “the wrong place at the wrong time”, he had missed out on both the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. “I was going to struggle to be competitive at promotion boards when the majority of my peers had had the opportunity to gain vital command experience on operations,” he says.

Cookson gave the army a year’s notice in 2006 and started looking at an alternative career in headhunting, consulting and financial services before deciding, with eight months to go, that the finance world was where he wanted to use his skills.

“It was as much about the type of organisation as the sector,” he explains. “I wanted to work in an organisation that employed good people and that was energetic and dynamic. In the army I was used to coping and dealing with change and a rapid tempo of life, so I wanted a dynamic environment to work in. And, of course, it paid better than other industries as well. “I was lucky because I joined in May 2007, before the financial system started to unravel, but I had interviews at three other places at the same time and so I think I would have got another job within a few weeks anyway.”

Cookson found his current position in the risk division of Credit Suisse through Everard’s recruitment agency but the armed forces do their bit for departing servicemen and women by offering careers advice and holding workshops to teach job-hunting techniques such as CV writing and interviewing.

In the mid-1990s, the Ministry of Defence contracted out its resettlement role and that contract is now held by Right Management, which runs the Career Transition Partnership in co-operation with the MoD.

Two other bodies, The Officers’ Association and the Regular Forces Employment Association, are sub-contractors to Right Management, and help with its job-hunting website Rightjob. The Officers’ Association also puts serving officers who are looking to leave the forces in touch with others who have already made the transition. Cookson is one who is mentoring officers embarking on a similar path.

“I’m on The Officers’ Association’s networking list and I see about one person a week on that list and I’ve been really surprised at the different approaches that people take,” he says. “Some are really methodical and have clearly done their homework, others come across less well. I asked one guy when he was leaving and he said, ‘In three weeks’ time’. And I was the first person he had contacted.

"It’s very important to do your prep and homework in advance and frontload as much networking as possible. You have to work out why you are different from all the other people leaving the forces, and anticipate the type of questions that you are going to be asked. These can include: What can you offer? Why are you interested in financial services? Why are you different from all the other captains and majors leaving the army at the same time? When I’ve asked people those questions some of them have looked like rabbits caught in the headlights.”

One man who prepared particularly thoroughly for his switch to the civilian commercial world is Brigadier Andrew Jackson, who is now head of government solutions at consulting company Kenexa.

Jackson, who attended the army’s Career Transition Workshop two years before he left, spent his last four years in the army as director of recruiting. “I always knew that running recruitment was like running a business in the army,” he observes. “I had quite a lot of resources at my disposal and it positioned me very well for a transition to commercial life. I had the option to be a defence attaché but I wanted the recruiting job because I knew I would have to leave at 55.

“The company I now work for came after me because they bumped into me when I was looking at ways of improving recruitment. We had a whole load of bilaterals and I looked at what they were doing in the US.”

But officers are not the only people who can expect to walk into white-collar management jobs. “It’s wrong to think that this involves just officers,” says Everard. “We’ve just put a warrant officer into an investment bank. They shouldn’t be stereotyped as non-management staff.”

He is referring to Keith Palmer, a warrant officer with 22 years’ experience in the army, who he put up for a post last year as an assistant vice-president at Barclays Capital, running a team of analysts. Not that banking was at the top of the list when Palmer, a Royal Engineer who ended his career as a training officer with the Territorial Army, reviewed his options two years before he left.

“I was pretty keen to keep my options open and as an engineer I looked at the health and safety route, project management in construction and in the operations area,” he recalls. “Investment banking was not a world I had originally considered. Military warrant officers might not ordinarily see banking and finance as a possible career path but when I read the write-up on what the job entailed much of it was very similar to what I had been doing. I could see the transferable skills.”

It may also have helped that the person who hired him, Arthur Soar, is a former military man himself and would have been aware of the sort of experience a warrant officer would have gathered.

Once the job has been secured, people who have spent years in an extremely hierarchical environment have to adjust to a different working culture. Rule by diktat is replaced by a more touchy-feely approach and not every ex-serviceman or woman adapts well to this change.

Volker Beissenhirtz, head of the Berlin office of legal consultancy Schultze & Braun and a former captain in the German army, told the Wall Street Journal last year: “More often than not, soldiers tend to state their opinion in a frank but solution-oriented way—if they think that the people they are talking to have the same or a lower rank. But if they perceive the person to have a higher rank, they tend not to argue, withholding their own opinion and awaiting orders.”

Kenexa’s Jackson finds his new environment a refreshing change. “I was delighted to get rid of hierarchy as it allows you to get things done in a way which is difficult in a hierarchical structure,” he explains. “A flat structure allows you to get things done quickly. There’s quite a lot that the military can learn from the way civilian business operates.”

So how do military types fare once they are in the boardroom rather than the officers’ mess? Well above average, according to the findings of a report by executive recruitment company Korn/Ferry International written in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit. The 2006 survey, which looked at the performances of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, showed that chief executives with military backgrounds held office for longer and delivered better returns than peers from the civilian world.

The report identified six key leadership traits that allow chief executives to perform “exceptionally well in the boardroom”. They are: learning how to work as part of a team; organisation skills, such as planning and effective use of resources; good communication; defining a goal and motivating others to follow it; a highly developed sense of ethics; and the ability to remain calm under pressure.

To any ex-military man or woman, all those traits would sound extremely familiar.