Preparation of soldiers for a second career: evaluation of approach of the Czech Republic

Abstract

Current employee career concepts are characterized by an unstmctured process and variability, not only in the case of job positions or employers but in some cases also professions in which individuals are forced by the job nature to leave careers early. A typical example is a military profession, which is not lifelong. In most cases, soldiers leaving the army do not reach the statutory retirement age and seek to integrate into the labor market by starting a second career in a new, civilian job. However, the actual situation of adaptation to civilian conditions is often difficult. Therefore, there is a need for the involvement of ministry of defence and embedding supportive procedures in the relevant legislation and strategy documents to ensure a system approach for soldiers whose contract was not prolonged. The aim of the article is to evaluate current approaches to helping soldiers of the Czech Aimed Forces in their career transition. In order to meet the goal, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 experts from the Ministry of Defense of the Czech Republic and other institutions dealing with the help to former soldiers and qualitative questionnaire was carried out with 313 former soldiers of the Czech Armed Forces. The obtained data were further processed and analyzed using the SWOT method The possible implementation measures based on the implementation of the strategy, obtained at the output of the SWOT analysis, were suggested.