Graduate Evaluations of the University Armed Service Units Experience

Annually, around 2,000 students with experience of the OTC, UAS or URNU leave university and enter paid employment. We can assume, if we extrapolate from the evidence presented in Chapter 3, that having maintained a relationship with their unit for a significant period of time during their studies, these individuals recognised at the time a value to their USU participation. The question which then follows is whether, and in what ways, that experience is understood as having value after graduation. In this chapter, we explore four quite distinct ways in which graduates perceive there to have been value in their USU experience. We consider what they say about value, specifically in the workplace and around their employability, we assess the idea that USU graduates might be ‘defence-minded’ for life and how that might be understood and seen as manifest by graduates, we consider how individuals assessed their own value to the USUs and the armed forces, and we explore the wide-ranging perceptions of the graduates about the value of the USUs.