To answer the original question, it’s bad it would seem.
I have lost 4 CI’s in the last 12 months. One was my Adj and another my shooting officer with a mountain of qualifications. The other 2 CI’s have left to join the forces, but this was always on the cards.
I have been unable to replace any of them so I currently stand at 4 staff down on this time last year.
I was at Wing HQ last week bemoaning my lack of staff to the lovely E1 who works there. She told me I wasn’t alone and it was becoming a common theme across the wing!
Random high input staff. Completely unpredictable, from CI to Sqn Ldr no pattern of age, or role, or unit. There one minute, gone the next.
Folk who were ‘semi-detached’. Might turn up once or twice a month, whether to drink tea and chat (no loss), or more specialist who would do one thing but very well. Big loss. Lots of them just stopped coming back.
Lots of folk who were once active in most areas of activity on the Sqn, and would turn up for wing stuff. Much more choosey about what they do, much less likely to volunteer for stuff they aren’t interested in.
Difficult to judge for me as I wasn’t at my Sqn pre-covid, so I don’t know what ‘normal’ looks like at a WTD or whatever, but I wouldn’t fall of my chair if the ‘gone completely’ loss was 25/30%, with the ‘withdrawl of enthusiasm’ losses being about another 25% - so may be 50% fewer people turning up for stuff like Wing athletics or WTD…?
Obviously, the stuff we have no problem staffing is the stuff that the ACO has spent the last 20 years making harder to do…