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Service Training Chiefs Explore Joint Initiatives

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS060303-08
Release Date: 3/3/2006 12:17:00 PM

By Jon Gagne, Naval Education and Training Command Public Affairs

PENSACOLA, Fla. (NNS) -- Education and training leaders from all four branches of the U.S military and the U.S. Coast Guard met at Naval Air Station Pensacola Feb. 8-9 to participate in the 2006 Interservice Training Summit.

This annual summit explores practices and methodologies being used by each service to train and educate personnel. This year’s event was sponsored by the Naval Education and Training Command (NETC) and hosted by Vice Adm. Kevin Moran, NETC commander and deputy chief of Naval Personnel.

“We all share the fact that we are trying to transform our services into a skills-based work force,” said Moran in kicking off the summit. “We are faced with certain challenges in developing strategies for our people to make us a smarter and more efficient force, and this conference offers us an opportunity to learn how to partner off each other by sharing resources.”

Among the wide range of topics discussed at the summit were e-learning, Web-based training, retention, attrition, and battlefield training for combat. The theme of the summit focused on competency-based performance, which is the practice of mapping skills, context and learning knowledge to job performance. All four services are presently using individual skills-oriented systems to evaluate their training and education programs, and each service provided a presentation on how they are progressing with these new initiatives. The featured speaker was Michael L. Brown, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the SkillsNet Corporation.

“What SkillsNet did with the Navy a couple of years ago,” Brown said, “was develop a Knowledge, Skills and Abilities (KSA) data base of the Navy’s baseline capabilities. We identified tasks performed at every level, and mapped them to the jobs being performed in the fleet on a daily basis. And what that provided the Navy was a new way of looking at their inventory and managing personnel.”

Industry, Brown said, is already using a national Occupational Network (ONET) developed through the Department of Labor. This database provides the occupational classification framework for every job throughout the United States. Brown’s company is currently involved in the development of a similar system for the DoD.

The services are hoping the proposed DoD system will make it easier – and cheaper – to develop training and education materials that ensure service members have the necessary skills when they need them the most.

“The DoD’s Human Capital Strategy,” said Rear Adm. Gerry Talbot, U.S. Navy staff, Director, Military Personnel Plans and Policy Division, “is designed to organize the department’s manpower, personnel, training and education institutions around the idea that we have to deliver a dominant force to the fight. This new force has to be a force that meets a variety of situations; blue or brown water Navy, big battlefield Army, maneuverable Air Force and Marine Corps, and traditional Coast Guard maritime security. This force has to be integrated. It has to be able to work together and it has to able to assimilate their inherent capabilities rapidly.”

Talbot added that the initiatives coming out of the Human Capital Strategy to support this joint force is a shift to a competency-focused command personnel management system as opposed simply to jobs.

“Looking at just jobs doesn’t provide us enough information into the work that has to be done to get the training right,” Talbot stated. “We need to be able to break down the work into constant KSAs to understand how they fit into a task, and be able to grade them against performance.”

In the joint-service arena, the ability to tailor training from an individual service concept to a joint-service concept is becoming increasingly important. As more and more taskings are placed on joint operations, events such as this training summit in Pensacola provide an opportunity for the services to share ideas, share inter-service dialogue and the exchange of training practices and technology.

For related joint-service news visit the DoD’s DefenseLink Web site at http://www.defenselink.mil. For more news on the Naval Education and Training Command visit http://www.netc.navy.mil.