Situation

Leaving the forces after years in — what's the first year actually like?

You've got a date. Resettlement has started or is about to. The briefings tell you about CVs, pensions, housing and the Career Transition Partnership, and all of that is useful. None of it tells you what the first winter is like when nobody tells you what to do in the morning.

About 14,600 regular service leavers left the UK armed forces in 2024/25, and the Ministry of Defence reports that roughly 86 per cent are in work six months later. That is the number everyone quotes. It says nothing about whether the job was the right one, how many were back on a different contract within two years, or what it cost the people around them.

What people ask

• What's civilian life really like after twenty years in — the first six months, honestly?
• Did anyone leave and go back in? What made them?
• What did you do with the first job offer, and did you take the right one?
• How did your family find it — the move, the change in you, the money?
• What did nobody tell you at resettlement that you wish they had?
• Is it true that the first civilian job rarely lasts?

What no search can return

The official guidance is thorough on process. What it cannot tell you is what the first year felt like, which parts of it caught people out, who went back and why, and what the people who are three years ahead of you would do differently. Those things exist only in the people who have done it, and most of them are never asked.

Where the people who have been through it gather

• The Career Transition Partnership, which most service leavers pass through and which sees around ten thousand people a year.
• Regimental, ship and squadron associations, which keep in touch with people long after they leave.
• The Forces Employment Charity, the Royal British Legion and Help for Heroes, which run transition and mentoring programmes.
• Op ASCEND and the Armed Forces Covenant network, through local authorities.
• The forums where people already ask these questions out loud: the British military subreddit, PPRuNe for the RAF, and the service family federations.

Open questions in this situation

Questions nobody has answered yet, kept here so that they can at least be found.

• Who left the Army and went back in — and what made them?
• What does the first civilian job interview feel like after twenty years in uniform?

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