Retention Through Guiding
Question. Does making thriving veterans visible in the network make serving members stay in the CAF, or leave sooner?
Analogy. It works like a town watching the people who left and made good elsewhere: word that they thrived can steady the ones who stayed, proof the place builds something that lasts, or it can empty the town as people leave to follow, and which way it runs turns on what the leavers show, a life that carried the place forward or a clean escape from it. The study asks whether making thriving veterans visible to serving members lowers or raises their intent to leave the CAF, and whether the kind of thriving shown flips the sign.
What's at stake. Serving members build their picture of life after service from the veterans they can see, and today those tend to skew toward struggle. The proposal claims that making thriving veterans visible improves that picture and reduces attrition, which matters because early attrition is a named and now-sourced problem: the most junior ranks leave at 9.4 percent against a 4.3 percent CAF average, driven by difficulty adapting to service. But the sign of the effect is genuinely uncertain. Seeing veterans thrive could ease the pressure to leave, on the view that service builds something that lasts, or it could be grass-is-greener and accelerate departure, showing that leaving is clearly survivable and even good. The proposal bets on retention and has not tested which way it actually runs.
The two answers it decides between. Either visible thriving veterans, especially ones who carry their service mindset forward rather than escaping from it, show serving members that service builds durable capability and a community that values it, so exposure lowers the intent to leave; or visible thriving ex-members lower the felt cost and risk of leaving, so exposure raises it, the grass-is-greener effect. The likely moderator, and a sub-finding, is which kind of thriving is shown, mindset carried forward versus escape from service.
What a null result would mean. If veteran visibility does not move serving members' stay-or-leave decisions in either direction, the attrition-reduction benefit the proposal claims for the veteran network needs revision: the network may be valuable for reintegration without being a retention lever. That is a finding about the personnel theory, not a sign the platform was built wrong.
Why this matters to defence. Early attrition is a live, costly, Auditor-General-flagged problem (DRDC Objective 2, supporting members before, during, and after service). The result changes a concrete decision: whether to treat the veteran network as a retention lever at all, and if so, what framing of veteran thriving to make visible, since the study's moderator says the framing may flip the sign. A null is itself useful: it stops the CAF from investing in a retention mechanism that does not retain.
How we would run it. Show serving members the thriving veterans in the network, varying the framing, veterans who carry their service mindset into civilian work versus veterans who present civilian life as an escape, against a matched group not exposed, and measure both stated intent to stay and, over a longer window, actual stay-or-leave decisions. The discriminating measures are the direction of the effect and whether it flips with the framing. The only-us part is a real network of genuinely thriving veterans visible to serving members, which a managed study cannot manufacture, because a staged thriving veteran is not believed the way a real one in a trust network is.
Earliest start. Stage 13: the study needs a network of genuinely thriving veterans visible to serving members.