When Kayam Iqbal left military, his personal experience of readjusting to civilian life inspired him to do something to help his former colleagues make their own transition from military to civilian life.
In 2011 he set up JobOppO, a jobsite dedicated to ex-military personnel to help them find employment. Even in the early days Kayam recognised that, although employment was a cornerstone to a successful transition, ex-military personnel had a great many other challenges to face.
A key objective of JobOppO was to support military charities. JobOppO supported a number of initiatives including a charity event on HMS Belfast to raise funds for Help The Heroes, Combat Stress and OppO Recruitment, a commercial recruitment company was established in January 2013.
Kayam felt that much more need to be done to support ex-military personnel on their return to civilian life and so in 2014 he founded a new charity for ex-military personnel, The OppO Foundation.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Kayam said, “Transitioning from the military after 12 years of services was really tough.” He was medically discharged for post-traumatic stress disorder, following his tour Afghanistan. He had joined RAF when he was 18 and had no experience of a civilian job. He slipped through the net, and realised how difficult it was to get noticed and appointed. While he worked at Camelot selling scratch cards, he used his free time to study for some project management accreditions, which got him a job in BT's technology team.
As he climbed his career ladder, he thoought about other military leavers like him, inexperienced and unskilled, but energetic and determined to prove themselves. So he wanted to set up a company to help people like himself and Job Oppo was founded.
Iqbal's business has now grown to an annual turnover £5.5m. He has eight employees and also finds time to run the OppO foundation, a separate, standalone charity that he set up to support those who have served within the Royal Armed Forces. His advice is to budding entrepreneurs is to network as much as possible- as being able to contact people with a wide range of backgrounds and experience is priceless. He also added, for small businesses to prosper, one must understand its customer inside out.
