Does this translate military terms automatically

No. There is no dictionary of ranks or trades in the product and no model anywhere in it. What it does is keep your words exactly as you wrote them and show you what a parser made of them.

Should I put my rank on the page

Put the job. Rank tells a civilian reader almost nothing and the responsibility it stands for tells them a great deal. Where the rank is the recognised qualification, keep it beside the role rather than instead of it.

What about clearances and dates of service

There is no dedicated field. The additional section takes a heading you name and a list of lines under it, which is where qualifications, clearances and courses usually sit.

Does the checker know anything about service records

No. It reads a text and reports what it read. It is not an employer's system and it makes no prediction.

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Service on a civilian résumé, and the translation no tool here will do for you

A service record is a complete description of responsibility written in a vocabulary a civilian reader does not share. Translating it is writing work, and it stays yours.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12 · updated 2026-09-13

— rank is not a job title. write the job.

The résumé editor, with the document rendering beside the sections being edited — The editor. Sections on one side, the real document on the other, updating as you type.

A service record describes responsibility more precisely than most civilian job descriptions manage. It describes it in a vocabulary that a hiring manager in logistics or engineering has never had to learn. That is the whole problem, and it is a writing problem. The résumé builder will not solve it, and it is worth saying why before saying what it does.

There is no translator here

No dictionary of ranks, no trade-to-civilian mapping, no model. Nothing in Conxfolio calls a language model anywhere, which is set out in how the résumé reader works without a model. A product that offered to translate your record would be guessing at what you did, and a guess on a résumé is a liability you have to defend in the room.

What it does instead

It keeps your words. When you import a document, the specialists that read it may only quote spans of your own text, and a field that cannot be filled honestly is left empty and counted rather than invented. What arrives in the editor is your record, sorted, with the gaps visible. Dropped fields and why they are counted describes that behaviour.

The translation, in three moves

Write the job rather than the rank. Write the size rather than the unit. Write the outcome rather than the duty. Responsible for the maintenance of a vehicle fleet becomes ran maintenance for a fleet of forty vehicles with a team of nine, and cut unscheduled downtime over two years. The second version is the same fact with the scope a civilian reader needs, and it is the version the checker's rules can read.

Which words the rules recognise

The ATS résumé checker grades content with four rules. Action-led achievements looks for a line that opens with something you did. Measurable evidence recognises percentages, currency, multipliers and a number followed by one of a list of unit nouns covering people served or led, things run or delivered, and time. Evidence depth counts the achievement lines under experience. Readable volume counts words. None of them knows what a battalion is, and the report prints its own arithmetic so you can see exactly what it did and did not read.

Qualifications, courses and clearances

Service produces a long list of certificated training, most of which is invisible to a civilian reader and some of which is decisive. The builder has a certifications section and an additional section you can name yourself. Put the decisive ones in the first and the rest in the second, and cut the rest. Certifications on a résumé covers the ordering.

The letter is where the change of direction goes

The résumé editor with the document rendering beside the sections — The editor. The document on the right is the real render, not a preview of one.

A résumé states the record. A letter can explain the move. The cover letter builder builds its proof paragraphs from sentences already in your résumé and carries each one back to the line it came from, and it will not invent a reason for wanting the job. There is an optional field for what only you know, in your own words, and that is the right place for a transition. Career changers and transferable lines works through the same problem from a different direction.

Check it against the words a parser knows

After the rewrite, run the checker and read the counts under the ring rather than the score. Words, lines and recognised headings tell you whether the document came out in the shape you wrote it in. The completeness chapter names each check that failed in the report's own words, so a section the parser could not find is stated rather than inferred.

That feedback is more useful on a translated service record than on almost any other document, because the failure mode is specific: headings and role titles the rule set does not recognise. On one of our own measured examples a single line that began with a status word rather than a role left the entire experience section unread and cost twenty points of the published score. The measurement is in unpaid work on a résumé, and the fix there is the same fix here.

What is not claimed

No page on this site says a document gets anybody hired, and the checker says on its own face that it is not a hiring prediction. What is true is narrower: a page written in words a civilian reader and a parser both recognise is a page that gets read. The career change guide and tailoring a résumé to a job carry the rest, and everything here is free with no account.

Write the civilian version

Import the record you have and rewrite it section by section. Nothing is sent anywhere except the text you ask us to read.

Open the résumé builder Read the career change guide

Questions

Does this translate military terms automatically: No. There is no dictionary of ranks or trades in the product and no model anywhere in it. What it does is keep your words exactly as you wrote them and show you what a parser made of them.
Should I put my rank on the page: Put the job. Rank tells a civilian reader almost nothing and the responsibility it stands for tells them a great deal. Where the rank is the recognised qualification, keep it beside the role rather than instead of it.
What about clearances and dates of service: There is no dedicated field. The additional section takes a heading you name and a list of lines under it, which is where qualifications, clearances and courses usually sit.
Will the letter explain my transition for me: It selects proof paragraphs from your own résumé lines and will not invent a reason for wanting the job. There is an optional field for what only you know, in your own words, and that is where a transition is explained.
Does the checker know anything about service records: No. It reads a text and reports what it read. It is not an employer's system and it makes no prediction.

Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.