Working Across the Service

If you choose a career in the Royal Navy, your workplace will be pretty unusual.

Whatever direction your career takes you in, you will find variety unrivalled by any other career. Every few years you will work on a different ship or shore base, where you will enjoy new experiences and meet new people.

Here are just a few of the possibilities:

On a helicopter carrier or assault ship with up to 1,000 others – they are the largest ships in the fleet and can act as command centres for military and humanitarian operations as well as comprehensive platforms for modern warfare and deployments around the globe.

Destroyers and frigates make up most of the Surface Fleet. In conflict situations, destroyers mainly deal with attacks from the air, while frigates provide defence against other ships and submarines. However, both can handle just about any task, from evacuating a disaster zone to chasing down drug smugglers, people traffickers and pirates.

A smaller fighting ship, such as a mine countermeasures vessel – the crews of these ships are like a close-knit family ready to do the painstaking job of removing and neutralising mines.

A submarine, with a crew of 130, gathering intelligence, inserting or recovering Special Forces, or striking land-based targets with Tomahawk missiles. You could be on an a Vanguard Class Ballistic Submarine working with the UK’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent.

A Royal Marines Commando unit – trained to operate anywhere in the world from mountains to deserts and jungles to the Arctic.

On a busy Naval Air Station – the helicopters of the Fleet Air Arm give the Royal Navy the flexibility to operate with both the Royal Navy and Royal Marines in the air as well as on land or sea.