Pros
Education opportunities and Adventurous Training/Sports - BUT you must sort it out yourself and not waste the opportunities that are there; they will not land in your lap. Personally I've taken D&I lvl 2, Lvl 3 Managing Trauma Risk, Lvl 3 Education & Training, Lvl 3 Coaching & Mentoring, Lvl 5 Service improvement, and Lvl 7 Strategic Management and Leadership in the last 18 months. My colleagues did precisely nothing. As part of the job, I was given some low level functional skills type mandatory qualifications and an NVQ level 2. I actively sought out the Level 3 and encouraged colleagues to take it too. Additionally, judicious use of Open University cost reductions and Enhanced Learning credits means I've also completed a degree whilst in service. As part of the AT spectrum, I've also gained a fair few sailing qualifications and a VHF Licence. I will reiterate again - there are good opportunities that should be grabbed with both hands but you cannot expect someone to just give it to you. You must understand that these things make up part of your pay and benefits offer so letting them fall by the wayside is like ignoring a free buffet at the party. The best bit of advice I've ever heard is 'resettlement starts the day you join'. The Navy will keep cutting benefits until there are none left and I therefore urge you to take advantage while you can. Ensure you understand your benefits and don't wait till later - rules can change in the blink of an eye and you don't want to be kicking yourself in the realisation that you're now stuck. Other benefits should be self explanatory - you will get a bit of travel to some of the places in the world you would never buy a plane ticket to visit out of your own pocket, you'll meet some interesting characters (some of whom you'll get stuck with for life) and you'll probably learn more about yourself than in any civvy job you could hope to get. You'll get a fairly decent pay packet, mostly for doing work that isn't the hardest thing you could be doing on the planet; although watch keeping during OST isn't great fun. You'll get a bit of time to skive off to go to the gym every now and again and things that can be difficult are much easier; such as getting a dentists appointment and a free prescription. Conveniently, someone writes a daily diary for you so you don't even have to think, you just have to read it and do. Someone might even do your laundry for you, and theres plenty of free socks on offer so long as you don't annoy stores. You'll never forget your first foreign run ashore and you'll see some of the best night skies with shooting stars included, whilst the very next day be getting paid while swimming on the perfect 0 lat and long. Your day isn't normal by the normal definition, your normal is a heightened experience, the swings and roundabouts of emotion feel like rollercoasters.
Cons
With every high, you will get some lows, and sometimes it will feel endlessly low. This is why you absolutely must take as many benefits to smooth out the bad times. There will be times when you are really looking forward to your holiday but your boss will cancel it a week before hand for operational reasons and they won't say sorry, they'll just say 'life in a blue one shippers' and expect that you had travel insurance that will repay you. You don't get to complain about it, its part of what you sign up for. You might be expected to sit outside in the pouring rain and you're really tired as you've not had a day off in weeks. Theres going to be times you will have a sense of humour failure about it all and really just wish you could go home and not have to live with a bunch of what feel like chimps for colleagues, with the added insult that you are showering in cold water in the middle of a South Atlantic winter. There is going to be a time when someone shouts at you for something being done 'wrong' and it feels a little bit more like they are taking their own frustrations out on you because no one has been allowed to speak to their family in 7 weeks and on top of that, the work is both tedious and monotonous. You still have to keep your morale up because your own team depend on you for direction though, and it will all fall to pieces if you slump into negativity. Sometimes; you're going to work for an incompetent boss and you'll clearly see he really doesn't care because its his last draft before retirement and all he cares about is making sure he turns up enough so he gets his pension as planned. It will seriously make you wonder how the hell he got promoted into his rank in the first place and make you feel that the promotion system makes a mockery of itself. You'll need to outwardly respect him and try and keep the place running though, because if you don't, something is going to go seriously wrong. It would be nice to make things better but he won't let you make any real changes because it might make a civvy whose favourite phrase is 'we've always done it that way' cry about it and he can't deal with public displays of emotion, particularly since the crying woman wants to have closed door chats with him every time she feels a bit aggrieved. The times like these are the ones where you just need to take a deep breath and remember that you're still going to get paid at the end of the month. Its also the days that you need to ask yourself why you are here, and if you are not doing anything additional on top of the basic functions of your role to better yourself, for yourself; then you need to assess why you are bothering to stay. Having cheap education and time off work to go to the gym should be one of the drivers behind why you put up with the rubbish parts. Get yourself as qualified as possible for the day it really all does become too much despite the pro's and you decide to click the 7 buttons of freedom. You will have a decent resettlement package if you've been in long enough and its an incredibly useful bonus, but I promise you that you will regret not using SLC's every year or taken advantage of cheap adquals when that time comes, especially if you need early release and can't use all your resettlement entitlement. Some people were in this job for their whole career as the pension trap kept them going; but the younger generation doesn't have this luxury and need to be ready for a second career despite having just dragged themselves through a 20 year career characterised by repeated gulf deployments and manning shortages. Don't waste the few chances that remain for you.
