I can see where the two posters are coming from here Appoo, we recieve a lot of applications from ex forces people, normally along with a very long impressive looking CV (normally written in unfathomable military speak), sadly the fact they may have served for many years and held quite senior postions means very little in the outside world and it oftens comes as rather a great shock to these people to find that in most cases all you can offer is a basic mechanics postion when they actually were rather expecting to walk into a supervisor/certifiying postion.
The fact you hold a basic licence doesnt really put you at any great advantage, without type ratings its useless to a empolyer and will not normally secure you a postion as a licenced engineer, the best you can do is try and obtain a postion as a mechanic gain some valuable hands on knowledge and hopefully manage to get the type courses you need, i will PM you with one or two contact names up at Manchester