Career transition: the other obstacle course for military personnel

Our research into the retraining of military personnel (64 interviews) reveals that it's difficult to leave a profession that demands the personal dispositions and strong commitment that forge the " singular state " of military personnel, to use the terminology of the Haut comité d'évaluation de la condition militaire (High Committee for the Evaluation of Military Condition).

Dominique Lecerf, University of Montpellier; Anne Loubès, University of Montpellier and Claude Fabre, University of Montpellier

According to the German sociologist Max Weber, it is the fruit of "every organization, every institution with its own purpose".

Some 16,000 people leave our armed forces every year. The Defense Reconversion Agency helps 62% of them find jobs that are difficult to secure. Ultimately, only 37% of those who leave secure the job they found with the help of the agency. The need to get people back to work quickly and the pressure to find new jobs mean that operators tend to focus on employability and technical services. As a result, the human element is reduced to a portfolio of transferable skills.

Whether suffered or chosen, the loss of a job has an impact on the whole person, not just on his or her professional role. Change is synonymous with a step into the unknown, with doubts, questions and fears, and the resources needed to overcome them are specific.

By investigating the heart of military reconversion, this study highlights the need for identity-based questioning and support in the reconversion process. It shows the urgent need for a global approach that simultaneously implements the technical and psychological levers of reconversion. The aim is to enable the individual to rapidly gain autonomous management of his or her professional transition, by understanding who he or she is so as to accept and decide who he or she wants to become.

Before: a military man, but not only...

A person's identity is plural. It is based on three dynamic pillars: personal identity (innate and acquired), role identities in their socio-professional mosaic, and group identities. The result is an identity for oneself and an identity for others.

The uniqueness of the military stems from a very specific role identity - giving and receiving death through the service of arms; from a strong attachment to the group - soldiers refer to each other as brothers in arms; and to the institution - based on a system of values. The demands of service can lead to self-forgetfulness, to a "fusion" between the personal and the professional, to family "sacrifices"... as summed up by Alfred de Vigny's maxim: "Servitude and military greatness". The difficulty of detaching oneself from an identity of profession and group with strong ascendancy is a reality found in many activities, notably industry, health, education, trade unionism...

Firstly, the loss of a job leads to a "loss of self", as sociologist Danièle Linhart puts it. This change plunges the soldier into a zone of marginalization - known as liminality - which introduces chaos, suddenly imposing itself on his or her story, destructuring the plot, the heroes and the imagined "fall". The anguish that sets in thus introduces a curve of doubt similar to the mourning process, a word often used by those interviewed, for whom denial, anger, negotiation and depression introduce the final stage of acceptance: the new beginning.

A former soldier testifies:

"I had wanted to be a soldier ever since I was a child, and I had lived the dream of my life professionally. My life could have ended right then and there.

How to deal with this anxiety? A process of personalization, based on identity work and the evolution of a plural identity, can help to ease the transition. It's a re-personalization, a return to the foundation of identity. In particular, this questioning would enable the adjustment of inter-individual relationships and personal strategies to "cope"(coping) with threats, and enable the realization of the projection into a new social and professional life.

Distancing identity

This is all the more necessary given the depth of the military conversion process, as one interviewee explains:

"It's not just a change of job, it's a complete change of life. It's not just a change of job, it's a complete change of life. In fact, you go from giving your life to giving your arm; my job is to offer my arms, which is very different from giving your life".

If the influence of the group left behind proves invasive, the construction of identity is altered and threatened. Distancing oneself from it facilitates the completion of identity work, in which the individual's quest for meaning is the driving force behind action, and the key to professional transition. A former soldier confirms the importance of this stage:

"I had to figure out how to transfer skills from the army to suit the job [...] but the difficulty was that I had to build something that made sense".

In other words, soldiers need to think more about who they are than what they are. At the time of the study, the army recruitment service was advertising its slogan " Become yourself "! A fortiori, when leaving, staying, becoming or re-becoming are all part of the imperative of "maintaining oneself", not only to achieve the necessary detachment, but also and above all to maintain a balanced identity and provide a foundation for the new project. Indeed, professional transition involves a shifting context in which identity for oneself adjusts to identity for others, through a dose of detachment from the group left behind, favoring the taming of a group joined. Knowing how to become is therefore a key skill to develop.

A former soldier sums up this conclusion:

"You have to take charge of your own career transition and not wait for others to do the work for you.

The alternative of knowing how to become

But we only become ourselves in a given ecosystemic environment. When environmental benchmarks change, the pursuit of becoming oneself becomes imperative! For a smooth professional transition, it's essential that the partant grasps the need to re-situate his personal identity - who he is - within his changing plural identity - what he is.

To avoid becoming bogged down in the personalization process, the individual must take a step back from the group he has left behind, which continues to frame his identity for others: through its modes of operation, its system of values, the roles he plays or has played in it, the assets to which he has contributed, the collective myth in the writing of which he has participated and in which his own myth has found a place.

A sufficiently salutary distancing must leave room for the writing of a new page in one's plural identity. Our results show that the polarization of individual identity by the identity of the collective appears to be an obstacle to a rapid return to sustainable employment: 70% of leavers in this situation are only 20% to have kept the job contracted at the start. This finding is less pronounced three years after departure. In fact, the process of intentionally distancing oneself from one's employer offered, in the long term, a 50% greater chance of keeping the job.

However, it's not a question of wiping the slate clean, but rather of "sorting out" the temporary elements of identity for others, and the permanent elements of identity for oneself. This means that for some, the transition is a complete reconversion, and for others a simple bifurcation, or even a replication of the old profession: its value system associated with the image with which the individual is imbued; its normative framework and the resulting habitus.

A low-cost, dematerialized psychological support "module" dedicated to identity work and knowing how to become would be a start, and a minimum. Because fine engineering of the changing human being, in search of self-maintenance in project mode, implies a profound change in the economic logic of support.

To "focus on people", as is often put forward, we need to put the individual and his or her career plan at the heart of the system, to individualize services and the duration of support, and to give psychological assistance and consultants the necessary place and autonomy. This calls for a review of service providers' specifications and the measurement of their results, going beyond outplacement rates.

For example, the degree of acceptance by the individual of the new project, the rate of completion of a validated project, or the return to sustainable employment would provide new bases for support and assessment.

Unrealistic given the state of the job market? Too costly for the community? How can we answer these questions other than through inertia or denial? It's all a question of priorities!

This contribution is based on the thesis "S'extraire d'une identité de groupe à fort ascendant pour réussir sa transition professionnelle. Le cas de la reconversion des militaires " by Dominique Lecerf under the supervision of Anne Loubès, defended on October 30, 2020..

Dominique Lecerf, Associate Researcher at the MRM/GRH Laboratory, University of MontpellierAnne Loubès, University Professor, Director of IAE Montpellier, University of Montpellier and Claude Fabre, Senior Lecturer in Management Sciences (specializing in human resources), University of Montpellier

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