Jake’s Story: From Frontline to Fire Stopping

Behind our ERS Gold Award are people like Jake.

The Defence Employer Recognition Scheme Gold Award is the highest level of recognition given to employers who support the Armed Forces community, and it sits alongside our commitment to the Armed Forces Covenant. It is an award we are proud of, but the value of it is not in the badge. It is in the careers it stands for.

Jake joined the Army Foundation College at Harrogate at 16 and went on to train at ITC Catterick. He served six years with the Royal Welsh, an armoured infantry regiment working with Warrior vehicles, before leaving the forces in 2023.

Like a lot of service leavers, the hardest part was what came next. Military life provides structure, purpose and a clear sense of where you fit. Civilian employment offers none of that automatically, and the skills built up over six years in an infantry regiment do not always translate neatly onto an application form.

“Trying to find a job mostly, because obviously it was infantry, and then you come out and you haven’t got the skills for most jobs.”

He moved between roles for a couple of years before joining R&M Williams as a labourer. It gave him a route onto site and a first look at how a live construction project actually runs, from programme and sequencing through to the trades working alongside one another day to day.

From there he looked at what else was happening across the site and found fire stopping. Passive fire protection is one of the most safety-critical trades in the industry. It covers the sealing of service penetrations, compartmentation and the fire-resisting details that hold a building together in the event of a fire, and it depends on installation being carried out exactly to specification, recorded properly and signed off. It is precise, procedural work with no room for shortcuts, and it is a discipline that suits people who are used to working to a standard.

Jake is now working towards an NVQ in passive fire protection, learning the trade alongside one of our experienced fire stoppers ahead of sitting the course. Learning on site rather than in a classroom means he is picking up the trade in the conditions he will be working in, with someone experienced beside him. The plan after that is to stay with us and take the work across our sites.

That progression matters to us as much as it does to him. Fire remediation is one of our core sectors, and demand for competent, qualified passive fire protection operatives across South Wales and the South West continues to grow. Building the skills internally, rather than relying entirely on the wider market, is how we make sure that work is delivered to the standard our clients and residents expect.

It is also why we look to the Armed Forces community when we recruit. Service leavers arrive with attributes that are difficult to teach: reliability, teamwork, an understanding of process, and a respect for safety procedure that has already been tested in far harder circumstances than a construction site. What they often need is the opportunity and the training route to convert that into a trade.

Asked what it means to work for a company that goes out of its way to support veterans, Jake was clear.

“You see on the news a lot that veterans struggle when they come out of the army. So, for a company to go out of their way and support veterans, it’s very positive.”

His advice to anyone leaving the forces tomorrow and wondering whether construction is worth a look was shorter still.

“Go straight for it.”

Recruiting from the Armed Forces community is something we take seriously, and the ERS Gold Award reflects that. Support of this kind only counts if it continues after someone has been given a start, which is why the focus is on training, qualification and long-term progression rather than the initial hire alone.

We will keep backing service leavers to train, qualify and build a career with us.

If you are leaving the forces and considering a move into construction, we would like to hear from you. Click here to see our current vacancies.