This Remembrance Day, a look at what comes after service. Most Veterans move into civilian work successfully - but for the nearly one in five who find the transition difficult, the outcomes look very different.
Remembrance Day asks us to pause and remember. It's also worth spending a moment on what comes after service for the people who return home and build a second career in civilian life - because for most, that transition works, and for a meaningful number, it doesn't, and the difference matters.
Statistics Canada's 2024 Canadian Veteran Health Survey found that 84.5% of core working-age Veterans were working at a job or business as their main activity - comparable to 83.8% in the general population, and among the employed, 80.3% reported being satisfied with their main activity. On the surface, the transition story is a good one.
But the same survey found that 61% of Veterans described their transition to civilian life as easy, while 18% found it difficult - and the difference isn't just about how the transition felt. It tracked closely with employment outcomes: 87.8% of Veterans who described an easy transition had found satisfactory work, compared with just 58.8% of those who found the transition difficult.
That's close to one in five Veterans navigating a harder transition, with meaningfully worse odds of landing in work that actually fits. For Western Canada employers, insurers, and case managers, that's a population worth understanding a little better - not as a policy category, but as a set of real files that occasionally land on a desk.
A civilian workplace doesn't always know how to translate a service-acquired skill set, a service-related injury, or a period of adjustment into a functional picture that fits its usual claims or accommodation processes. That's exactly the kind of question functional and vocational assessment is built to answer: not what someone used to do, but what they can sustain now, and what a realistic path into a new role looks like.
If your team is supporting someone building a second career after service - through an accommodation process, a return-to-work plan, or a claim - a clear functional and vocational picture can make that transition a fair one instead of a guess.