From Armed Force to Workforce

SCQF Partnership introduces a new Military Skills and Qualifications Discovery Tool that helps veterans and employers appreciate the value of skills gained through military service.

Those who have served in the military can bring a wide range of skills, knowledge and experience to any job role, yet there has been a history of those leaving the armed services not being able to find employment that fully utilises their diverse and valuable skillsets.

To help make Scotland the destination of choice for those leaving the armed forces, the SCQF Partnership has been working with Skills Development Scotland and the Ministry of Defence to enhance the Skills Discovery Tool on the My World of Work website to include armed forces roles. The project was funded by the Scottish Government and Scottish Funding Council. This tool is available to all and is designed to help users understand the range of valuable transferable skills they have gained through their job roles and volunteering experience. For military roles, it now also allows veterans to find the broadly comparable SCQF level of qualifications taken in service so  they can better describe these to Scottish employers.

This easy to use tool allows serving personnel, service leavers and veterans to select their role, rank, cap badge or trade from a wide range of UK armed forces roles. Based on these job roles, the user will then be given a pre-filtered list of qualifications so they can select those they have completed. The results page will then show a wide range of transferable skills that they have gained throughout their time in service so these can be highlighted in CVs and application forms. They will also be given a list of the qualifications they chose and their broadly comparable SCQF level, along with examples of other qualifications at the same level of difficulty which may be better recognised.

This useful tool has been designed to help serving personnel, service leavers and veterans explore the skills they will have developed throughout their service and know which skill areas to highlight to potential employers. Knowing the comparable SCQF level of their qualifications will allow employers to be able to compare these to other qualifications in their field so they can better understand their skills and experience. By knowing the comparable SCQF level of qualifications they already hold, it will also help users to make better decisions about the appropriate level of any further training they may want to take.

You can find out more on the SCQF partnership website.

The SCQF is Scotland’s national qualifications framework and provides a way of recognising, describing and comparing the difficulty and notional time taken to achieve a whole range of qualifications and awards. In addition to mainstream qualifications, the SCQF also contains vocational and skills-based qualifications, and learning programmes developed and delivered in the workplace or community. The existence of other qualifications frameworks across the rest of the UK and beyond also allows us to recognise the comparable level of qualifications taken outside Scotland.

As well as helping us to understand qualifications, the Framework also allows us to benchmark skills, abilities and experience at different SCQF levels. Work on this project complements the wider work being undertaken by the SCQF Partnership to support the recognition of skills, abilities, experience, and all learning, whether it be formal or informal.