Armed Forces Covenant

What's been going on?

So recently I've been finding out a little bit more about Ear Tanker and they've just been recognised with a Gold Armed Forces Covenant Award.

I've been speaking to some of the people behind the award to find out what they're actually doing to support the armed forces community.

Because this isn't just about putting a logo on a website.

for veterans to access education.

They're quite big on the Armed Forces Covenant as well.

So you're one of the trailblazers, I would say, when it comes to the Open University.

So you get your degree, you get your law degree.

Every member of the recruitment team are aware of the Forces Initiative.

They're aware that we've signed the Armed Forces Covenant, that we are a gold ERS award holder, and that by signing the Armed Forces Covenant is that we guarantee interviews for any candidate coming from the forces who meets the minimum criteria for any particular role.

So you'll remember at all my events I always say I'm that wolf of Wall Street, I'm that dog with a bone.

If anyone who works or is in the process of leaving the armed forces use me as your kind of starting point, and I'll point you to the right consultant who will be aware that you meet the minimum criteria for a role that you may be seeing on LinkedIn, that you maybe saw on the Scottish Power website, that you saw on Indeed, wherever you saw one of our vacancies, if you see that you meet that minimum criteria and you can kind of highlight that to ourselves, then we will confirm interviews on that basis.

So again, what we are doing to kind of really kind of put our flag in the ground and kind of champion the forces community is all our external adverts towards the end of the year we're getting this approved and probably should be in place within the next kind of 46 weeks is that every single advert that you'll see from Scottish Power externally will have a paragraph at the bottom of the advert that asks Why Scottish Power? And in that area of our adverts, it champions what we do in the industry and the electrical network and all our electrical infrastructure, the budgets that we're working with and the money that we're ploughing into the electrical network and infrastructure.

It talks about diversion and inclusion, et cetera.

And what we're going to do is we're going to add in a forces paragraph um that will highlight to anyone who is from the forces community reading our adverts that we are a forces friendly company and we allude to our gold ers award and we allude to having signed the armed forces covenant um we talk about people coming from the military people coming people as a current veteran that you're welcome at scottish power

and that is going to massively um ramp up your visibility online on search engine seo optimization and all that sort of thing so that when people are putting into whatever search engine they're using scottish power is going to hopefully just pop right up at them so it just it just gets you right up there which is great

We are a social enterprise, so that means we have to donate a minimum of 50% of our profits, otherwise we'd lose our status.

And the Armed Forces Covenant as well.

So that was really important for us as a veteran.

We wrote into our covenant pledge that we're going to support not only service personnel, but their families and children.

usable?Well, DRM, Defence Relationship Management, was set up as a result of FR20, which was the objective to grow the Army reserves and to improve relationships with employers so we didn't make mistakes again of the past.

And it was a, a huge success, and we saw the Armed Forces Covenant and the Employer Recognition Scheme as tools of that relationship.

Now, their budget hasn't actually increased, and indeed, James Cartlidge asked a written parliamentary question to the minister, Calvin Bailey, about what is the budget for the Strategic Reserve, and the answer came back, there isn't one.

So straight away, there's an issue there around budget of the Strategic Reserve.

So you heard that phrase cadet force adult volunteer.

And for anyone that's been involved with the Armed Forces Covenant or the employer recognition scheme, you would have seen the fundamental changes in the dialogue when we talk about the Armed Forces community.

Because I think it's really important, Jez, that when we speak about the Armed Forces community, We speak about every single constituent part, which is why I was so passionate to get you on the show.

Because the more we can champion the cadet element and help people and educate people in some cases around the value, not only of the cadets and the amazing young people.