Growing Fresh Careers

Ruralink works with rural businesses and the land-based community to develop sustainable careers particularly for ex-military staff.

British agriculture, food and the wider land-based sector is changing rapidly. Emerging technology, structural changes and a new regulatory framework provide exciting new opportunities at all levels for people with diverse prior experience. Ex-military personnel have many of the skills and attributes needed at this time of immense change. 

We are proud signatories of The Armed Forces Covenant and actively work to promote and support ex-forces personnel.

We focus on helping individual businesses find and employ ex-military staff, including assistance targeting candidates with a specific skillset, translating their CVs to understand their career history and supporting both parties to bridge any cultural gaps in the early stages of employment.

Wherever you are on your resettlement journey, planning ahead, actively looking for your new career or a couple of years on civvy street and wondering if there is more to life, if you value quality of life, personal fulfillment and making a tangible contribution to your community, farming, food production, land management and a whole host of linked careers on the land may suit you.

You already have the skills, technical qualifications and personality needed on the land and traditional and new roles are coming available every week. But breaking in can be very difficult. 

We are creating a suite of gateway courses to help break down the entry barriers to a land-based follow-on career.

By sponsoring and facilitating The Rural List, we nurture a network of people just like you who benefit from meeting and supporting each other through resettlement and their follow-on career on the land.

We are actively seeking partners across the country to develop focused short courses to qualify highly motivated members of the military community to embark on their follow-on career. If you wish to co-present a course aimed at the military community, please  email courses@ruralink.org.uk.

Ex-military personnel of all ranks are highly trained pragmatic problem-solvers, planners and creative thinkers, used to living with and managing change. They may not have a detailed knowledge of your business but they will certainly ask why you do things the way you do, make constructive suggestions for change and are capable of managing that change with you. Crucially, they have worked in an environment that expects collaborative planning but demands unity once a decision is made, so they will pull behind your business plan once in place, even if they advocated for a different direction.

We have a small core team who work remotely to mange the head office function. For each project, we then employ an expert consultant, including ex-military wherever possible. This provides our clients with unrivalled expertise, cultural context and a direct link into the military community. It also provides the ex-military consultant with a “Gateway Job” from which each can go on to develop their own land-based career with us, with our client, or elsewhere in the industry.

We are developing a suite of "Gateway Courses" to support resettling personnel and their employers.

We will shortly open for applications to our first "Rural Business Gateway Course".

The Armed Forces Covenant is the nation's commitment to the military community in recognition of the sacrifices service personnel and their families make for us.

Fiona Galbraith signed the covenant for Ruralink on 23 August 2019. You can read our pledges here and and out more about the scheme here.