Inspiration – the powerful force inside us.
Inspiration is a formidable force that has the power to transform lives. It can impact our creativity, motivation, and productivity, unlock our potential, and improve our overall wellbeing, propelling us towards greatness, success, and a more meaningful life. Its value as a catalyst for important change should never be underestimated. It’s a mighty weapon in anyone’s armoury.
However, within the military spouse and partner community, it has an additional purpose.
Having a career alongside military life can be challenging. Not all careers lend themselves well to this transient lifestyle, with regular postings across the UK and abroad, sometimes as often as every two years.
50% of military spouses reported that military life has had a negative impact on their careers, with one in six stating they’ve had to leave a job or education to allow their serving partner to pursue their careers. *
Many military spouses and partners find themselves having to give up the career of their choice and look for an alternative that works well alongside military life. That’s where inspiration comes into play because inspiration drives change, lights our fire, and fuels our creativity.
This is how the MCN is inspiring its members and enabling great career choices.
Spotlights on Careers
Our “Day-in-the-life of” series shines the light on different career options that work well in a military context. We look at different job roles, what your typical day-to-day responsibilities would be, and the skills you need, including training options and top tips on how to get started. When you’re thinking about a career choice, it can be a mind-boggling experience. Job titles are constantly changing or being reinvented.
Just take my sector for example. We have Chief Marketing Officers (CMO), Marketing Directors, Marketing Managers, Marketing Executives, Content Creators, Content Managers, Communication Managers, Copywriters, Social Media Managers and many more. How do you get your head around that? Understanding what each one does is invaluable insight when it comes to making a career choice, so we help our members to achieve that.
Spotlights on Organisations
We want our members to have all the facts at their fingertips to support that all-important decision-making process. Many organisations and charities offer career support to military spouses and partners, but how do you find your way around them and how do you know which one is the right one for you?
We know that navigating websites, hopping from page to page and back to try and find the information you’re looking for, can be onerous and time-consuming, sometimes confusing and frustrating, so we do all the hard yards for our members.
How? We conduct in-depth interviews with these organisations and summarise the key points in easy-to-read, easy-to-navigate blogs. We ask the questions that we know our members want the answers to. We fill the gaps that websites often throw up. We join the dots and make it easy to get the information you need.
Inspirational Stories
We encourage our members to share their stories in blogs of how they went from A to Z as a way to inspire others to take the first step toward change. It’s so important to hear stories from your peers, from people who get you, and who share your life’s experience because it really does drive home the reality of the possible and make it feel within your grasp.
Case study presentations
We invite our members to run online sessions where they can talk through to a live audience how they got into their current career, including their starting point, the steps they took, where they are today plus any recommendations, they have for others considering similar careers. And our members get to ask their questions too, which we subsequently capture in FAQs and make available to everyone in our Members Area.
Top Tips
We work with other organisations and charities that focus on getting military spouses and partners into work and pick their brains on their top tips across a range of things, such as interview techniques, CV writing, how to get into the Civil Service and more.
We talk to organisations such as the Association of Scottish Businesswomen for their top tips on business success or share gems of wisdom from business leaders who inspire us personally such as Dragon’s Den Legend, Theo Paphitis, a personal favourite of mine.
Coworking Opportunities
Working with like-minded people in a shared office space also offers another source of vital inspiration because people inspire people. Our hub users have told us that as a result of talking to their peers and observing what they do, they have felt inspired to consider career paths they would never have even entertained on their own. The shared coworking experience has opened up new windows of opportunity and inspired some fantastic changes in their thinking, their choices, and their actions.
Conclusion
Inspiration is a catalyst for change. Providing the right inspiration is important too. It needs to be realistic, achievable, and genuine. Here at the MCN that is what we do. We want our members to have successful careers alongside military life, so we do all we can to enable that, and that includes all of the above.
* 2023 MCN Evaluation Report
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