Presently we are really lucky with a modern house and we will be settled for the next few years. Although the job is busy and can be stressful, we almost always have the weekends together and we are in a lovely area where we can afford to get out and enjoy our life as well as saving a large portion of our wages for a house deposit. Overall at the moment we have a great quality of life, though I do worry that with the price of SFA increasing we will be forced to save less to afford the payments for the SFA or be forced to continually buy and sell on each move, potentially losing money, market dependant and missing out on the family communities.
I neither enjoy nor don’t enjoy life in the RAF. I’m married to a man who is married to the RAF!
Shrinking numbers with an ever increasing workload finds those left to be far busier than before. With numerous issues regarding SFA and recent changes to both pensions and pay it is understandable why many are questioning their future.
Quality of life on the whole is good. However poor standard of military accommodation and work stresses relating to promotion can cause the quality of life to be reduced.
Pinch point trade - nearly 300 pers short, pressure showing. Huge degree of moral blackmail being exerted to work long hours and take on extra duties.
Put simply, if you are on the operations side of the RAF, don’t expect much in the way of quality of life. The RAF is still an interesting place to work and I’m proud to say I’m in the RAF, far more than I would be proud to say I’m a banker or an accountant, but the way we are going is creating mono-dimensional people with no life outside of work, running them into the ground and discarding them at the end of their careers. A better work life balance would go an awful long way to improving quality of life and therefore individuals’ performance.
Quality of life is what you make it, taking advantage of opportunities when they arise. Notwithstanding this, whilst I understand the need for efficiency savings, the solutions constantly appear to erode the advantages of service life.
In previous years the “impact of RAF Service” on family life was mitigated by a fair salary. Fantastic opportunities, professional service, proud to serve.
I’ve constantly been made to feel like the wives of serving personnel are still widely seen as stay-at-home support pillars whose main purpose it is to facilitate their partner’s career. I know dozens of talented, well-educated, driven women who were driven out of the careers they loved because of frequent postings and a lack of support networks that made it impossible/ unaffordable to continue training or move up in their career. Often, the best they can hope for is moving sideways permanently, which makes them/their CVs even more ‘unemployable’.
We are losing so many technical trades to civilian companies. I am an avionics CPL and it is rare to find a cheerful optimistic junior rank working on the aircraft. A large portion of juniors are seeing salaries outside and leaving.
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