Some of you will, and already have, disagreed with this, but actually, it all boils down to money in the end, and feeling valued by the organisation. If you are paid more money, you can put up with more nonsense, hence why we pay our Loan Service personnel a premium. When the nonsense increases seemingly without limit and the take home pay actually goes down, along with the pension (I'm thinking the CAAS rebanding exercise for those in SFA) then of course people are miffed. I'll give you some examples of common disgruntlements what i mean by it all coming down to money and value:
1. Too much trivia and not enough flying. VALUE. Why do I as a professional operator of multi-million pound equipment directly delivering air power have to be patronised to by some ill-educated twerp about something I am perfectly capable of doing through a god-given common sense. Example, the Defence Information Management Passport, the GPC users course, the UK matrix test for a F600. All set up for perfectly good reasons for people who know no better. The 3 instructors on most OCUs established for 8 or so don't have time or space for this cr@p so employ someone to make it go away-can't, no money. Result, personnel feel undervalued. However, pay them more salary and they would give less of a sh!t.
2. Said operator of multimillion pound air power delivery system can see a much better way of approaching a process. Can't because its all to diffiuclt to get aggreement between contractor, security idiots and procurement idiots. Result, wasted money on poor procurements, wasted time on unneccessary process = undervalued personnel. Pay them more salary, they would give less sh!t.
3. Cannot get wiley contractor to even commit to fix faults or admit they exist in your MQ, personnel is distracted by home situation and family are unhappy. Solved by money because if you were paid super-well you would just get a man in to fix it and screw the contractor.
4. Exhausted family, unpredictable routine, etc. Pay enough to get some help around the house, a babysitter every now again, zen restored. More money.
So, cynically, most of this can be, if not fixed, offset at least by more money. Since the RAF is so fond of contractors, why don't we all become self-employed contractors? The RAF would have to pay say £250,000 a year for the use of one JO pilot for a year, after 6 years initial RoS upon initial training. So no 3rd tourist or older would be retained at all unless they were promoted. Instead, they just bought in the services of a suitably qualified person. In return, no housing, no pension commitment, no schooling allowance, no uniform, no ancilliary non-employment related training or quals would be provided. An unending joker card was issued to be smashed in the face of any blunty waiving an DLP online learning course, or mandatory seminar workshop at you. And in return you flew. Lots. And other people untangled the contractor's wiley lies, and un-fu@ked their sh!t documents and their useless equipment. Other people argued with security over devices and processes already used by thousands of organizations more valuable than ours, and other people had to sit in a room being shouted at by the regiment. I would sign up for that tomorrow. I think the RAF gets pretty poor value out of it support services, and I think in most cases I could do better for myself on my own, with enough money. Medical? BUPA. SFA? More money, buy own house. MT? Own car, more money, not so bothered about using for work. JPA? Sweet FA more like. The odd thing is, I bet if you added it all up, my idea with the £250,000 salary would actually be cheaper than what they do now. You could even call it, Professional Aviator or FTRS or whatever you liked. You could even give it a different badging, etc. If this went along with people getting accredited training in the first place then they could make their own choices at the end of the RoS and there would be a 2-way street, rather than the simple one-way street of simply being told you are going to have waste more of your most productive years working for an organisation that doesn't value you just to qualify for less pension than they said they would pay you.
As the beardy knight once said, train people so they can leave at any point, treat them so they don't want to. I wish so very much the RAF would apply that. But it won't so people will continue to leave, and people with more egg on their hat will continue to believe it doesn't matter just as long as teenagers with 5 GCSEs are willing to turn up to Cranwell on the vague hope of one day sitting in a typhoon. For those of us who have been here a few years it feels like someone who doesn't know what they are doing is playing with the Chernobyl fuel rods here, and trying to find out, by turning up the BS and down the money, at what point the whole thing goes bang. I don't think we are far off finding out...
Just my idle musings.