A practical guide for service leavers on writing a CV that gets noticed, translating military experience and transferable skills into civilian language, and why project management can be a natural next step.
Based on the Wellingtone Community webinar, Turn Your Service Record Into a CV, with Simon Parsons from Wellingtone and Dan McGuigan from Morson.
Every year, around 14,000 people leave the UK Armed Forces and move into civilian employment. They bring with them a wealth of skills and experience, but communicating that experience to a civilian employer can be a challenge.
Military roles, responsibilities and qualifications do not always translate easily onto a civilian CV. Acronyms, ranks and terminology that are second nature in the Armed Forces may mean very little to the person reviewing an application.
In this guide, we share practical advice from Simon Parsons, Principal Project Management Consultant at Wellingtone and REME Reservist, and Dan McGuigan from Morson. They explain how to translate military experience into a CV employers understand, avoid common mistakes and demonstrate the transferable skills you can bring to a civilian role.
We also look at why project management can be a good fit for service leavers and the qualifications and experience that can help with the transition.
When should service leavers start writing their CV?
The earlier, the better.
Do not wait until the final few months of your resettlement period before starting to think about your CV.
Dan recommends creating a working CV as soon as you begin considering leaving the Armed Forces. Use it to capture your experience, achievements, qualifications and responsibilities while they are fresh, then continue developing it as your plans become clearer.
Simon also recommends getting your CV and LinkedIn profile in place early. They give you something tangible to build on when you attend career fairs, speak to recruiters or start networking with potential employers.
Your CV should continue to evolve throughout your job search. In particular, avoid sending exactly the same version for every vacancy.
As Dan explained:
Please do not buy into an ethos where you have a one size fits all CV. You will have to tailor it to make sure that your CV stands out against the position you are applying for.
Tailor the language, skills and evidence to the role you are applying for.
What CV myths do service leavers need to unlearn?
There is plenty of advice about CV writing, particularly during resettlement, but some of the rules you hear are not necessarily rules at all.
Myth: A CV has to be exactly two pages
There is no hard rule.
Dan’s guidance is that a strong CV will typically be between two and four pages. If you have served for twenty or thirty years, trying to squeeze your entire career into two pages can mean removing valuable experience and evidence.
The priority should be relevance and quality, rather than hitting an arbitrary page count.
Myth: Everyone will understand my rank and abbreviations
They won’t.
Do not assume a civilian recruiter knows what your rank means, understands the structure of your unit or recognises military acronyms.
Where possible, translate them into terminology that makes sense in the role or sector you are targeting.
Myth: I need to give myself a senior civilian job title
Be careful not to over-translate your experience.
Dan gave the example of describing a WO1 as the equivalent of a Programme Director. While there may be transferable responsibilities, simply replacing one title with another can create problems if the experience underneath it does not match.
Your CV will form the basis of questions during an interview, so make sure every claim is something you can confidently explain and evidence.
Myth: AI can write my CV for me
AI can be useful for reviewing wording, suggesting alternative phrases or helping you organise your thoughts, but it should not replace your own experience and voice.
Dan also warned that AI-generated CVs can introduce Americanised terminology or generic language that does not sound natural in a UK recruitment context.
Use it as a tool, not as the author of your career history.
Myth: I can copy a friend’s CV
A CV from someone with a similar military background can be a useful reference, but it should only ever be a starting point.
Your CV needs to reflect your own responsibilities, achievements, experience and career ambitions.
How do you translate military experience into civilian CV language?
This is one of the biggest challenges for many service leavers.
Your experience is valuable, but a civilian recruiter needs to be able to understand it quickly.
During the webinar, Dan shared a before and after example.
The original military wording described:
“A platoon sergeant within three rifles, managed CS James, responsible for 30 soldiers, delivered BFT and readiness.”
Translated into civilian language, this became:
“Operations Team Leader. Led a 30 person multi-skilled team to maintain operational readiness in a high-pressure environment. Improved equipment availability to 96% by introducing weekly checks and clear ownership. Delivered training for 45 colleagues, achieving 100% completion before deadline.”
The responsibilities have not been exaggerated or changed. They have simply been expressed in language that a civilian employer can understand.
A simple translation checklist
When reviewing your own CV:
- Swap ranks and unit terminology for functional descriptions where appropriate, such as Team Leader or Operations Manager.
- Spell out or replace military acronyms unless there is no sensible civilian equivalent.
- Focus on outcomes rather than simply listing duties.
- Explain the size and scale of your responsibility.
- Include measurable results where you can genuinely evidence them.
- Check whether military training or qualifications have a recognised civilian equivalent.
The aim is not to hide your military background. It is to make sure the reader understands the value of the experience behind it.
How do you write CV bullet points that get noticed?
Once you have translated the terminology, look at the evidence you are giving the reader.
“Led a project team” tells an employer very little.
Simon demonstrated how much stronger the same experience becomes when you explain the outcome:
“Led a critical project two weeks ahead of schedule, increasing operational efficiency by 18%. Introduced quality checks that reduced rework by 25% and generated an estimated £140K in annual savings.”
Dan recommends thinking about each achievement in three parts:
Action: What did you do?
Scale: How big was the responsibility? Think about budget, people, sites, assets, timescales or complexity.
Outcome: What changed as a result?
For example:
Action: Led the sustainment plan.
Scale: £22 million programme, 480 staff, three remote sites and 1,500 assets.
Outcome: Cut downtime by 18% and sustained 85% availability across two years.
Numbers can make an achievement much easier to understand, but only use figures you can explain.
As Dan warned during the webinar:
“Do not fall into a trap of just putting statistics on there just for the sake of it. Make sure you can give the backstory to how you got to that value.”
If a recruiter asks where a figure came from, you should be able to answer.
What should a service leaver’s CV structure look like?
Once you have the right content, make it easy for someone to find the information they need.
Dan recommends the following structure:
- Contact details
- Target role and professional profile, giving the reader a quick understanding of who you are, the level you operate at and what you can offer
- Key transferable skills
- Employment history and achievements, prioritising the experience most relevant to the role
- Qualifications and training, including civilian equivalents where appropriate
Before sending your CV, check:
- Is the language tailored to the job advert?
- Have you removed or explained military ranks, acronyms and jargon?
- Can you evidence the achievements you have included?
- Is the formatting consistent?
- Have you proofread it?
- Has someone else proofread it?
- Is everything included relevant to the role?
Two to four focused pages will usually be far more useful to a recruiter than, in Dan’s words, a “Harry Potter novel”.
What transferable skills do employers want from ex-military candidates?
Live audience responses from the Wellingtone webinar: the transferable skills service leavers bring
During the webinar, Simon asked attendees which transferable skills and qualities they associated with people moving from the military into civilian employment.
Leadership, planning, teamwork, adaptability, communication and project management all featured prominently.
These skills are particularly relevant because employers are interested in more than qualifications alone.
As Simon explained:
“Businesses want a good balance of qualification and competence. Competence is knowledge, skills and experience or behaviours. Just because you have not been in a project manager role while in the military, you have been doing things that use the same skills project managers need.”
Rather than simply listing skills such as “leadership” or “communication”, use your CV to show where you have demonstrated them.
What did you lead? Who did you communicate with? What problem did you solve? What was the result?
The evidence is what makes the skill meaningful.
A simple translation checklist
When reviewing your own CV:
- Swap ranks and unit terminology for functional descriptions where appropriate, such as Team Leader or Operations Manager.
- Spell out or replace military acronyms unless there is no sensible civilian equivalent.
- Focus on outcomes rather than simply listing duties.
- Explain the size and scale of your responsibility.
- Include measurable results where you can genuinely evidence them.
- Check whether military training or qualifications have a recognised civilian equivalent.
The aim is not to hide your military background. It is to make sure the reader understands the value of the experience behind it.
How do you write CV bullet points that get noticed?
Once you have translated the terminology, look at the evidence you are giving the reader.
“Led a project team” tells an employer very little.
Simon demonstrated how much stronger the same experience becomes when you explain the outcome:
“Led a critical project two weeks ahead of schedule, increasing operational efficiency by 18%. Introduced quality checks that reduced rework by 25% and generated an estimated £140K in annual savings.”
Dan recommends thinking about each achievement in three parts:
Action: What did you do?
Scale: How big was the responsibility? Think about budget, people, sites, assets, timescales or complexity.
Outcome: What changed as a result?
For example:
Action: Led the sustainment plan.
Scale: £22 million programme, 480 staff, three remote sites and 1,500 assets.
Outcome: Cut downtime by 18% and sustained 85% availability across two years.
Numbers can make an achievement much easier to understand, but only use figures you can explain.
As Dan warned during the webinar:
“Do not fall into a trap of just putting statistics on there just for the sake of it. Make sure you can give the backstory to how you got to that value.”
If a recruiter asks where a figure came from, you should be able to answer.
What should a service leaver’s CV structure look like?
Once you have the right content, make it easy for someone to find the information they need.
Dan recommends the following structure:
- Contact details
- Target role and professional profile, giving the reader a quick understanding of who you are, the level you operate at and what you can offer
- Key transferable skills
- Employment history and achievements, prioritising the experience most relevant to the role
- Qualifications and training, including civilian equivalents where appropriate
Before sending your CV, check:
- Is the language tailored to the job advert?
- Have you removed or explained military ranks, acronyms and jargon?
- Can you evidence the achievements you have included?
- Is the formatting consistent?
- Have you proofread it?
- Has someone else proofread it?
- Is everything included relevant to the role?
Two to four focused pages will usually be far more useful to a recruiter than, in Dan’s words, a “Harry Potter novel”.
What transferable skills do employers want from ex-military candidates?
Live audience responses from the Wellingtone webinar: the transferable skills service leavers bring
During the webinar, Simon asked attendees which transferable skills and qualities they associated with people moving from the military into civilian employment.
Leadership, planning, teamwork, adaptability, communication and project management all featured prominently.
These skills are particularly relevant because employers are interested in more than qualifications alone.
As Simon explained:
“Businesses want a good balance of qualification and competence. Competence is knowledge, skills and experience or behaviours. Just because you have not been in a project manager role while in the military, you have been doing things that use the same skills project managers need.”
Rather than simply listing skills such as “leadership” or “communication”, use your CV to show where you have demonstrated them.
What did you lead? Who did you communicate with? What problem did you solve? What was the result?
The evidence is what makes the skill meaningful.
Is project management a good career for veterans?
Project management can be a natural career path for service leavers because there is significant crossover between military experience and project delivery.
You may already have experience of planning activities, coordinating people and resources, managing risks, reporting progress, working within governance structures and learning from previous activities.
The terminology changes, but many of the underlying skills are familiar.
For example:
- Mission planning can translate into project lifecycle planning.
- Orders and briefings have similarities with project communications and stakeholder management.
- Risk assessment and mitigation translate directly into project risk management.
- Chain of command provides experience of governance and escalation.
- Post Exercise Reports have clear parallels with project reviews and lessons learned.
Simon made an important point about lessons learned during the webinar:
“A lesson is only learned if there is action from it. It is great jotting down all these points after an exercise, but it is no good unless you pull it back out and do something about it before the next one.”
That mindset translates directly into good project management practice.
Do you need a qualification to become a project manager?
You do not need to have held the job title “Project Manager” to have relevant project management experience.
A recognised qualification can, however, help you understand civilian project management terminology and demonstrate your knowledge to potential employers.
During the webinar, Simon discussed three APM qualifications:
- APM Project Fundamentals Qualification (PFQ): A starting point for people who are new to formal project management.
- APM Project Management Qualification (PMQ): A broader and more detailed qualification for people developing their project management knowledge.
- APM Project Professional Qualification (PPQ): A more advanced assessment of project professional capability.
Simon also cautioned against automatically choosing the most advanced qualification available.
He has spoken to service leavers who have gone straight into the PMQ and found it difficult because they did not yet have experience of civilian project management methodology.
The right qualification depends on your current knowledge, experience and career plans.
As Simon explained:
“The qualification side of things will help you translate your experience into the language of the project profession. But it is not all about that qual on the CV.”
Wellingtone runs a dedicated Project Management for Service Leavers course built around the APM Project Fundamentals Qualification.
Past delegate Ed Milward described the course as:
“An excellent experience and a great step for my transition from military to civilian project management.”
Funding options discussed during the webinar included Standard Learning Credits, Individual Resettlement Training Costs and ELC. Check your current eligibility with your resettlement officer or education centre before booking.
How should service leavers network before they leave?
Do not make your CV do all the work.
Both Simon and Dan highlighted networking as an important part of a successful transition.
Dan said:
“Networking, cannot stress the power of networking enough. The amount of service leavers we work with that have success, a lot of it is down to the networking they do themselves.”
Simon also shared a simple way of using LinkedIn to find veterans already working for an organisation you are interested in.
Search for the company on LinkedIn, open the People section and filter by past companies such as the Royal Air Force, British Army or Royal Navy.
You can then identify people who have already made the transition from the military into that organisation.
You already have more of a network than you might think.
Or, as Simon puts it:
Network like a badger.
Be proactive, speak to people and do not wait until you are actively applying for jobs before building those relationships.
If project management is on your radar, useful places to explore include:
- The APM Defence Sector Interest Network on LinkedIn.
- The Wellingtone Community, which runs regular free webinars.
- FuturePMO, Wellingtone’s annual PMO conference attended by 300 professionals.
What should you do next?
If you are starting to think about your transition, you do not need to have everything worked out immediately. There are, however, a few practical things you can start doing now.
- Start a working CV, even if you are not planning to leave for another year.
- Set up or review your LinkedIn profile so it supports the story your CV tells.
- Translate rather than transcribe your military experience.
- Add evidence by thinking about the action, scale and outcome of your achievements.
- Choose qualifications based on your experience and goals, rather than simply choosing the highest level available.
- Start networking and speak to people who have already made the transition.
- Ask someone else to review your CV before you start sending applications.
Want hands-on help with your transition into project management?
Wellingtone runs a dedicated Project Management for Service Leavers With APM PFQ training course.
The course is designed to help service leavers understand formal project management, translate their existing experience into the language of the profession and gain a recognised APM qualification.
Simon Parsons is also happy to talk through the different options and help you understand which qualification is right for your experience and career goals.
