No worries fella (I assume there are no lady infantry soldiers), nice to see that you’re being level headed and going into this with your eyes well and truly open. When I was going through resettlement it was truly shocking how many people thought that their military experience guaranteed them a new career. Just to see me off some of them did manage to walk out into well paid stable careers with prospects though most had a very rough reality check.
Great to see that you have your finances squared away, with the operational tempo of the last decade or so you’ve earned every penny of that money (and a lot more) the hard way spending months at a time away from family and friends in dangerous places and putting your life at risk. Fantastic to see that you are using the cash to do something that you obviously desperately want to do and is important to you.
Since completing flying training I have not had any paid flying work, I did get invited to a Ryanair assessment day, unfortunately the village idiot where I live kidnapped me and went in my place. That’s my excuse anyway, suffice to say I didn’t cover myself in glory in the sim and predictably received the custard pie email in due course.
It will be useful to have a Plan B to keep money coming in while you are looking for flying work post completion of training, not sure if you were able to learn any trades or skills in the Army ie HGV driving etc that might be useful in civvy street but you may have to rely on them when searching for flying work.
As the male modelling/ porn star career never got going for me, my Plan B was to fall back on my aircraft engineering work. I am now a technical consultant working for a consultancy that farms me and my colleagues out to various customers (mostly MoD). I am currently working as part of a small team of consultants within one of the project teams at Abbey Wood near Bristol. The work itself is mind numbing and could be done by a trained chimp but the pay is good, Abbey Wood is commutable from home and the people that I work with and for are great. The whole company that I work for are pretty much all ex military, mostly ex RAF though I’m ex Fleet Air Arm and my immediate boss is ex RLC Major (we try not to hold that against him) as you can imagine the banter in the office is pretty epic.
Once again, all the best and I hope it works out well for you