Thank you, sir. Good afternoon, everyone, Admiral Tofalo, Admiral Roegge, Admiral Merz, a lot of my former bosses out there as well, and friends and shipmates. It’s really
good to be here at the 34th Naval Submarine League symposium. It’s especially unique, I think, to be here talking about our Navy personnel situation from the perspective of the job I’m in right now. Frankly, having been in the personnel business a number of times before, I think the Submarine Force does it particularly well. I won’t be bashful about taking the stuff that I was taught in the Submarine Force and applying it into the Navy writ large wherever it makes sense.
The CNO, I think last night, outlined his intent with A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. The Gold Line of Effort is all about our people; our sailors, both active and reserve component; our Navy civilians, which are an absolutely essential component to our success as a force; and also our families. So it’s a privilege to be here to talk to you about The Gold Line of Effort, and I’m going to drill down into certain aspects of that which I think will focus minds.
The Gold Line of Effort, again, is about that one Navy team comprised of a diverse mix that I just talked about. This whole line of effort is about actively taking a leadership role, a role as a force, a role as a Navy, and leveraging all those components of our diverse Navy team. The five tasks associated with it—the first two—it’s a bit of an eye chart, I apologize. The first two, though, are really centered around delivering on Sailor 2025, which I talk about in some detail, and then putting the enabling foundations in place to make Sailor 2025 sustainable throughout the long-haul. I’ll talk a little bit more about why that’s so critical to our Navy in today’s personnel talent competition market, if you will.
The last three tasks are getting at those other aspects that aren’t necessarily things that we’ve traditionally thought about in the naval personnel stovepipe, but getting at broadening our efforts towards improving everything we do with respect to the broader Navy team. The third one is strengthen and broaden the leader development. The CNO touched on it last night in his remarks.
We do a phenomenal job throughout the Navy touching on the technical and tactical competence of our war fighters. We have community-specific and Navy-specific schools. We talk about leadership and leader development in the most specific terms and the most general terms. We have very formal mechanisms to help an individual grow in those areas of leader development.
The one area that we have sort of assumed and taken for granted, though, is this idea of an individual’s character. In today’s age, where we’re going to be making decisions faster and faster, and having to delegate responsibility and authority down to the lowest levels, it’s important that our leaders have that character to make the right decision even when no one is looking, all the time, so as not to lose the trust and confidence of the American public.
So the spin on things right now, the new effort that’s behind this, is working on formalizing that character development piece. Again, we do a phenomenal job of character development at the initial Sailorization process, whether that’s the Recruit Training Command at Great Lakes or the Naval Academy or NROTC or OCS programs. But it’s sort of a onetime inoculation. We don’t revisit it enough and we don’t revisit it with any measurable effect.
So the War College, Navy leadership and ethics, continues up at Newport and in the Naval Academy. NSTC runs our ROTC units, and my organization—we’re jointly working on what that curriculum would look like; putting some tools in the hands of our leaders to help deliberately think about and talk about character development: shipboard, at-sea, in operational environments, as well as at those touch points in the leader courses. And that’s consistent with the discussions that I think you’ve already touched upon with the whole idea of fleet-centered leader development.
There are going to be some Navy-wide principles that apply, no matter what warfare designator or community an enlisted leader might be in. And then there are going to be very specific things that you want to touch on due to the unique operating considerations of an individual community like the Submarine Force. So that’s what task number three is about.
Task number four is all about really empowering our CO’s. There are a whole lot of specific examples in Sailor 2025 that are related to pushing personnel actions down to the lowest level that we can reasonably delegate and ensure success. But it’s also about doing things like reducing administrative distractions.
I don’t know if any of you have read the Army War College study on setting ourselves up for success and not institutionalizing processes that unintentionally incentivize the wrong behaviors, taking the short cuts, things of that nature. We did a survey of the Navy-wide processes that were cumbersome, and just recently repeated it. I’m not proud to say that the top 15 were all mine in the personnel world.
There was everything from frustration to logging onto our web sites to filling out form X, just fill in the blank there. A lot of that stuff was recognized well before that survey and is being worked in Sailor 2025, and we’re working hard to remove those administrative distractions. The broader effort, though, is one that we’ve been working on as a Navy for a while. Admiral Richardson worked it for a while when he was at Naval Reactors. We still haven’t really gotten to the fundamental approach of getting meaningful input Navy-wide that we can go out and act upon. So we’ll be taking some turns on that as well.
Task number five is really reinvigorating our efforts to man- age and grow and nurture our civilian workforce. Our Navy civilian workforce is very diverse in terms of the skills that they bring to the table, and no two command’s civilian workforces look alike. The folks at LNR are going to look very different from the folks at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. They’re just a completely different composition of skills and cross-section of the labor market. The task is really about Navy leaders that have civilians working for them taking that active role in everything from career management, educational and developmental opportunities, things that you take for granted if you’re wearing a uniform: career management, progressive assignments, opportunities for leadership, from the bottom all the way to the top in terms of what you should expect for a Navy civilian career coming in the front gate.
Because those work forces are so different, though, we really can’t write a one size fits all strategy. So the CNO just signed out, about a week and a half ago, what we’re calling a Civilian Strategic Workforce Framework. Much like the design, it’s principles, it’s a way of thinking about how you go after solutions. It’s meant to empower the right folks. In this case, with the Civilian Strategic Workforce Framework, it’s about empowering the planning officers that own those civilians into writing their own strategy, and then giving them a couple of focal points and a couple of advisory boards. I will be the executive secretary for the CNO, taking those inputs from all the civilian workforce managers across the Navy. They’ll write their own strategies. We’ll be a forcing function. The unique challenge for me, as the Chief of Naval Personnel, I have absolutely no authority or responsibility associated with Navy civilians. It’s all retained within the SECNAV directorates. But, we can be a forcing function working with those organizations to kind of close up the gaps that exist there.
So those are the five tasks associated with it. If you read the top statement, we talk a lot about the families in there. And you’ll notice in those tasks there aren’t a lot directed at the families. We’ve begun to address that within Sailor 2025, but I think in version 2.0 of the design, when we revise it here at the beginning of the year, we’re going to add some specific tasks to get at the families. We’ve begun to work some focus groups with spouse associations and things like that to find out where we can really go out and work some things and make a difference.
Another eye chart here, not enough for you to read, but really just trying to impress upon you how much we’ve already done on Sailor 2025. That’s the name for the initiative that started out under Admiral Moran in his Talent Management moniker. We sort of relabeled it and re-thought a lot of these things. You’ve been reading about individual components in Navy Times, but it has only been in the last couple months that we’ve been talking about this in the context of Sailor 2025.
That is a living, breathing set of initiatives. It’s 43 different initiatives today. We’re getting a lot of input from the fleet. We’re adding things to it. We’re killing the ones that don’t pan out and not putting any further effort into it, and we’re expanding and evolving the ones that are showing a return on investment very quickly.
We’re using the principle of high velocity learning consistent with the design, and are not trying to polish the cannonball and make it perfect the first time out. We mitigate the risk, get it out there, find out what worked and didn’t work, and adjust it on the next iteration, making sure that we’re mitigating the risk properly.
That causes some conversations when you roll these things out. The Modernization Plan comes to mind, and we’ll talk a little bit more in detail about that.
Fundamentally, we talk about Millennials today and what they want in the workforce and what it’s going to take to retain them. But taking a step back from the individual desires, if you think of the Navy from the corporate sense and what our challenges are in terms of human resources for the future, we’re about 335,000 people, active duty, in the Navy today. Two hundred and sixty-six thousand of those folks have come into the Navy since 9/11.
We’re approaching a majority of Millennials. We know that Millennials demand to be involved in processes. They want transparency, they want choices, and they want flexibility. So Sailor 2025 has that in mind.
But there’s an underlying operational imperative that it’s important to keep in mind. Some other numbers to throw at you: Today we bring 40,000 people into the Navy every year. I send 40,000 people home every year. I do 90,000 PCS moves every year. That’s unsustainable, because fundamentally we haven’t changed military personnel system, the Navy’s personnel system, from the time of the draft.
When the All-Volunteer Force was cheap, we could do that. Money is not as plentiful as it used to be, nor do we think throwing money at the problem is necessarily going to be part of the solution. We know we’re at sort of the meat of the curve in terms such as you can double certain SRBs for certain rates and it would have no impact on retention.
So Sailor 2025 is built to do a lot of those different things. Some of the things that are in there are really aimed at taking that very wide based pyramid and narrowing the base. Let’s bring in fewer people each year. Let’s keep them around longer. Let’s give them choices to move around so that we don’t have to reinvest in the Sailorization, and sort of the upfront training investment that we have to make, and leverage the talent for as long as we reasonably can, even if that means multiple career shifts, doing things that heretofore would have been atypical or not necessarily recipes for success the way our career paths are structured today.
So that’s really what we’re getting at in the long-haul. The Rating Modernization Plan, which I’ll talk more about in detail here, it’s laid out in the Design. Our threat is changing by the second. The needs of our Navy are going to change much more rapidly in the future than they have in the past. Just because I have a mix of skills in our workforce, in the uniformed workforce in the Navy today that is able to meet those demands, it doesn’t mean that tomorrow I won’t need 20 new skill sets that I don’t have. We’re not going to be able to go out and train those folks from ground zero from the starting point, from civilians, and turn them into trained warriors in those skill sets rapidly. So the Rating Modernization Plan also has as an ulterior motive that ability to put agility into our system and repurpose our sailors to meet those rapidly evolving threats.
A couple of examples—let me just talk about one more over- view piece of Sailor 2025 and then I’ll get into a couple of examples I want to highlight. I really kind of broke it up into three major bins. One is modernizing the personnel system itself, and I’m not just talking about the IT, although that’s an important foundational element that’s going to be an enabler for this. But we’re starting with the processes and policies themselves, while we also modernize the IT to support that.
The middle category there is ready relevant learning, and then the third category is the enriched culture piece. On the personnel system modernization, its things like re-looking at the way we do enlisted advancements. Let me give you an example.
We spend about $33 million a year to bring people to Milling- ton, Tennessee to run the chief’s board. That’s a lot of money. I think we’ve got to be smarter about how we do this.
So we’re looking at ways to do that differently. It’s a very important ward, taking leadership of that seniority, given the influence they have on the way the Navy moves forward. We’re taking baby steps along the way, though, in terms of things that we already have the authorities for.
The Meritorious Advancement Program was one of those ones that we rolled out very quickly in 2015. We took a fraction of the overall enlisted advancement opportunities for E4s to E6s, and we turned it over to the command triad: the COs, the XOs, the command master chiefs. We gave them some guiding principles and said, you pick who to promote.
But the goal was to not cure the ills of the advancement sys- tem, pick folks that were up against higher tenure or folks that were in over-manned ratings, but go out and find talent that was maybe stuck in traffic through our performance evaluation system that causes these sort of artificial pure rankings within individual commands. And then we graded them. After the first year, they got about a 92. Eighty percent of the CO’s used the old habits that they did with the old command advancement program, but by and large folks did what we asked them to do.
The mitigation of risk there, as we rolled it out quickly, was it was only 10 percent of the advancement opportunities. The rest of the advancement was done through the Advancement Exam Program. We did over advance in four ratings, so we put some controls in place for this year, 2016, but we didn’t say you couldn’t advance somebody in those rates.
There was a little bit more vetting that had to go on, and that allowed us to do some throttling if we needed to. And, we expanded the number. We expanded from 10 percent to 15 percent, and we also expanded it from sea duty to shore duty. That season just closed. I don’t know what the results are on that yet, but I expect it will be similarly positive. So the goal next year will be let’s take it to around 25 percent of the advancement opportuni- ty that gets turned over to the COs, XOs and command master chiefs.
When we started this the vision was let’s do away with the advancement exams. Well, I’ll tell you, after studying the other services’ advancement programs, the Air Force and Army in particular have a merit-based commanding officer doing all the advancements for certain pay grades across the board. They’ve got some real problems with the little black book promotion systems and nepotism and things like that.
Our Navy-wide advancement exam program is institutional, it’s bureaucratic, it’s slow, but it has impeccable integrity and its objective and dependable. So maybe the right answer is a mix.
Maybe it’s 50/50. I don’t know what that is. We’re going to continue to experiment until we find that right mix.
We took some early steps on the officer promotion front as well. We blinded the boards to promotion zones for officers. We had our first three unrestricted blind officer boards this year under those new rules, and those six boards in January picked right up to the limit we’re allowed by the Secretary of Defense on below zone picks: 10 percent.
The O5 board picked zero below zone and 10 percent above zone. The O4 board picked about five and five above and below zone. I’m naturally a glass is half full guy, but I’m going to read that as the board read the precepts and chose who they thought the talent was instead of constraining themselves to some expectation that in-zone and above-zone and below-zone meant something specific.
So what we’ve asked for in FY ‘17 is the ability to pick up to 25 percent below zone, and we’ve asked for some other latitudes like 40 year retirements in specific cases, not writ large. So instead of O5s and O6s statutorily required to retire at 28 and 39 years of commissioned service respectively, we’d like the ability in certain cases to take that to 40. We’ve also asked for some ability to do sort of what we do on the enlisted side.
Today, we do this thing called the Senior Enlisted Continua- tion Board, which allows us to have no quota associated with the Board. The Board goes in and looks at folks that have been looked at twice for their next milestone, whatever that might be, promotions or screening. If they’re in neutral or reverse, we ask them to retire.
It’s low numbers each year, but what that does is that makes advancement opportunity for more talent. So we would need something like that. It’s a necessary evil if we want to promote more people earlier. So it’s things like that.
The Fleet Education Program is in residence education oppor- tunities at very high caliber schools where previously we couldn’t make those arrangements work. The Submarine Force has a number of officers off and running in those schools. SECNAV Tours with Industry is another one. We piloted this in 2015.
We had agreements with Amazon, FedEx and Huntington Ingalls Shipyard, and we sent officers out for tours with the tasking and reporting back quarterly and bringing industry best practices back to the Navy. This year we’ve expanded it to Microsoft, Apple, and about five others. So we’re getting officers out and doing things out of the normal career path with the idea of helping to bring things back.
In the future we’re going to roll out some electronic web- based versions of our fitness reports and evaluations. But the more significant task there is that we’re going to completely overhaul fitness reports and evaluations sometime in the next year. Our system does a really good job for what we use it for today, which is to determine promotions and advancements and screening. If you understand the code and you can write and decipher in that code, and each of our tribes has a different version of that code that the boards work towards.
It doesn’t help me with talent matching, though, with where to best assign people. It’s got some basic things in it, but it doesn’t really talk to potential in different aspects of Navy careers. So we’re going to add some pieces like that.
We’re going to add some more objective measures. We’re going to keep the peer ranking, because that has worked for us pretty well, but we’re also going to add an absolute objective ranking and there’ll be some hybrid scores in there. Then we’re going to add some talent matching pieces, and ultimately we want to go to merit-based pay as part of the overall compensation package.
So we’re going to need some input in there as to what addi- tional pay should this individual get. Maybe its a factor in multiples in selective re-enlistment bonuses and things like that where the CO gets to provide some direct input on, does this guy deserve a kicker or not? So tons and tons of things. I’ll come back to the Rating Modernization Plan at the end and talk a little bit more about that.
The second column, Ready Relevant Learning, is really three- fold. It‘s training for the right sailor at the right time. The Navy average right now is about two, two-and-a-half years, from street to fleet, to the first ship.
In the nuclear world, that’s understandable, but in some of these other occupations it’s not. There’s a lot of inefficiency in there. Then add on the fact that many of those sailors don’t use those skills in the latter part of that training until late in their first sea tour or their second sea tour, by the way the career paths are designed. So 50 percent of them leave and never use that training, so it’s just a bad return on investment for the Navy.
So we’re changing that. The Submarine Force did that about 10 to 15 years ago. We’re getting around to doing that in the big Navy now. We’re also bringing to bear some of the other tricks that the Submarine Force employed. Again, I told you I’m not shy about stealing your good ideas. But we’re applying science of learning and modern technology and modern training delivery methods across the whole Navy to really get at this.
In the enrich culture pillar, there are a number of different aspects of that. I think our Navy culture is pretty rich, but there are areas that we can improve upon. One is in the area of inclusion and diversity.
The CNO just signed out this one Navy team statement a couple of weeks ago, and that really gets to the core of it. We’ve been talking about diversity in the Navy for a long time. Any way you want to slice and dice the metrics: race, ethnicity, gender, it doesn’t matter, we’re making progress. We’re getting closer to being a cross-section of the country that we represent and defend.
We’re doing pretty well in the promotion and nurturing and career milestones for all of those groups as well. So the next logical step is, what do you do with the gift of that diversity? Think about what that brings us. It’s not just that those de- mographics I mentioned before, it’s diversity in the way people think, the way they look at problems, the way they look at solutions, the way they talk about them, the way they approach group dynamics.
We have not yet really formalized any of the leader training or development steps that deliberately think about a) recognizing those skills in our teams; and then b) deliberately picking and putting together our teams to maximize the effectiveness of the team based on those diverse skill sets. So consistent with those other efforts in leader development discussion I shared with you earlier, we’re looking to do that, put some tools in the back pocket of our command and leadership teams and help them more deliberately think about actively including the strength that that diversity brings us.
Another area under enriched culture is the family friendly services. We’re doing very well on expanding and assessing women in both the officers side and the enlisted side. The last two years we’ve exceeded 25 percent female enlisted accessions.
Right now the challenge there is not bunks at sea on our ships that have been converted, which is the overwhelming majority of them now, but it’s getting those women into the right mixes of ratings so that we can fill all those racks at-sea. They’re still tending to migrate towards occupational specialties that have been predominantly filled by women. We’re actively moving them out and encouraging them and incentivizing them to go out into those other areas.
That effort has really just been going on for the last year or so. But with those increased numbers, it’s going to be very important for us to retain those women. On the enlisted side, women are retained on average about five to six percent less than men. On the officers side, it’s at about half that of men.
There are a number of things we continuously survey for, but the obvious driver is the fact that we’re a sea-going service, family separation and the need and desire to start families and raise children. I’m not going to make any apologies for us being a sea- going service, but there are things that we can do to minimize the size of those obstacles and help and enable folks to start and raise families and still stay in the Navy. So we’re moving out on those.
It is things like child development center hours. We ran pilots last year and expanded hours at three different locations and looked at the utilization rates. By the end of this year all child development centers will have those expanded hours.
We’re looking at expanding child development center capaci- ty. One of the problems we have is that it’s kind of a revolving door of the child care providers at those centers. We’ve sort of hamstrung ourselves with the civilian workforce policies there, so we’re looking at preferential hiring for Navy spouses, as one of those things to help get at the spouse side of the equation and also helping us with the child care thing.
So it’s a number of things like that. It’s the maternity leave change that went from six weeks to 12 weeks last year. Next year we think we’ll have the authority to expand paternity leave and adoption leave.
Then we’ll also have things that help those that want to do family planning and adjust timing, so in vitro fertilization, things like that. There’s lots more to do there. We’ve really just begun to think of the things we need to attack. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve got some focus groups working towards that end.
It’s always dangerous when you’re the guy standing between the crowd and happy hour. I think I’ve got a few more minutes here, so I’d like to go on to a few other topics if I may.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re attacking this in terms of ad- dressing the policies and the underlying principles for putting all these programs together. Ultimately, though, to really get the full potential of what Sailor 2025 is all about, we’ve got to become big data, analytical, able to forecast things accurately, know things about what the workforce wants so I can target that compensation and say, Johnny, you want to stay in Norfolk and you want to get your graduate degree? I’m going to write a number on a piece of paper. This is going to be your paycheck for the next two years, instead of all these disparate pays and allowances that are mandated right now in the current legal system.
In doing so, if I know that about them, I can forecast that he is likely to take $200 or $300 a month less for that geographic stability or that promise of graduate education; or conversely, that I only need to pay him $900 a month more to Guam instead of
$1,200 a month that I’m doing right now. So that’s sort of the idea behind it. It’s automating everything from our PSDs, which my organization inherited in 2012.
At the core of this, right now today, I’m the resource sponsor for 55 different disparate databases, no two of which were designed to talk with each other. Some of them were written with COBAL and FORTRAN programming language. Every time I change a pay structure or a bonus authority and it changes the way in which we want to dole out these incentives, programmers have to come in and rework the system.
Not only that, I’m maintaining these legacy server farms, physically on our premises, and they’re frankly held together with bailing wire, Bondo and bubble gum, and they’re not long for this planet. So we’ve got to do something aggressive soon and we’re on a path to do that, to use commercial off the shelf, cloud-based systems, that will help us get at solving some of these problems.
The PSDs were just begging to be Lean-six Sigma’d, so we did that. Because of those databases, though—they’re not bad people working there—but because of the limitations of the database your basic PSD transaction involved moving data between every spot of those databases. And at each step there’s human data entry required to move it from one to the other, or back that only occurred at 1400 so if you read the system at 1359 or 1402 you’d get a different answer. Both of them would be wrong.
It’s no wonder every time your made a PCS move you’d get two months of error in your pay. That’s frustrating from a sailor’s point of view as a customer service thing. It’s dangerous for me in terms of the guy who’s physically accountable for this, because I don’t have a good picture of it.
So all these things are at play here and we’re working on it. But we didn’t want to just make our cumbersome draft era policies and processes work faster, so we started at the top and we’ve been streamlining everything before we go to the ITR automation stage. We’re working those in parallel.
I think we’re about less than a year away from the day where a sailor goes to PSD, gets their CAC card scanned, and they’re checked in, their pay is all straightened out, and that’s all they have to do. Their travel claims are liquidated. That’s being piloted right now. It’s just a matter of the scaling and the timing and the phasing in terms of how fast we do that Navy-wide. But I think we’ll have it up in volume by August of next year.
That’s the idea behind our whole transformation effort. I think that’s going to be incredibly important going forward as the labor market changes. Today you saw the fit and fill numbers that the Force Master Chiefs put out there. Our manning is phenomenal. That’s true across the Navy right now.
Our sailors are the best sailors we’ve ever had by any meas- ure. In 1990 we were paying about $30,000 to train a sailor to get them to their first operational assignment. Today it’s about
$92,000.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad, because I can’t tell you because I can’t do the analytics behind it to say where I could make more efficiencies. I think it’s probably bad and there’s room for improvement in there, so we’re going to work hard at it when we get these analytics in place. But more to the point, the talent market could turn on us overnight. We’ve got to be ready for those changes.
This month we’ve just made our 113th consecutive month of making our recruiting mission. The other services right now, the Army, is paying get on the bus to go to boot camp bonuses. They’re in a very different place than we are for a lot of different reasons.
But as I just told you, the market could turn on us at any moment. Our retention continues to creep up, even though unemployment is below 5.5 percent. Historically, that has never been the case. By every metric historically, recruiting and retention should have fallen through the roof for us. So we’re just waiting for the hammer to drop.
We’re looking at second and third order effects like wage growth for 18 to 34 year olds, and that’s pretty soft right now, but it’s on an exponential rise. We think we’ve got two to three years at best before we really start feeling some of those pressures that the other services are already feeling today. So we have to have this in place. It’s an operational imperative so we can be agile and responsive and retain that best talent.
Admiral Padgett reminded me I came here to talk about the rating modernization effort. I sort of talked about the operational imperative of this in terms of our threats changing rapidly and us being in a position ourselves to be able to repurpose our sailors quickly. But there’s also, kind of looking at that industrial age model, right now we’re still sending hundreds of sailors home every month.
We don’t do perform to serve anymore, we have this other mechanism that’s a little more humane called career waypoints, but it achieves the same result for Navy community purposes. That is, in certain areas if we’ve got too many people there’s no place to go. There’s going to be no advancement opportunities, there’s no billets for them to go to, there’s no opportunity for them to use those skills.
So every month, agonizingly, we send a couple hundred folks home. There’s a process that goes over about a nine-month period, and over that nine months they have plenty of warning that your particular rating or occupational specialty is over-manned. It’s time to think about doing something else in the Navy. They get eight looks and eight chances to transfer to something else or they’re forced to separate at the end if they don’t choose one of those eight opportunities that comes up.
By and large, those eight opportunities under today’s system are based on where we’re undermanned and where we can rapidly repurpose them, because we don’t have a mechanism in place that will help define what it is that it takes so that we can efficiently and expeditiously retrain them so that they don’t lose parity with their peers who now have six, eight, 10 years of operational experience advantage on them. For those that do transfer into other communities and specialties today, it’s a one-way street. You can do it once and then you have to make up for that deficit of experience, most of the time individually, sometimes with the benefit of a school or two.
So in many ways it’s not a fair fight and we’re not arming them to succeed in that new occupation once they’ve transferred over. There’s very little opportunity to go back, so it’s not very enticing to do from the sailor’s standpoint. So with Ready Relevant Learning coming online, there’s the ability to very carefully, very simply, know what training is required for each step of the career path.
There are a couple of other mechanisms that we just recently put in place. One of them is called billet-based distribution. It’s kind of one of those, why didn’t we do this 50 years ago? But we just started in February coding all the enlisted billets like we do officer billets with designators and ATB sub-specialty codes.
We paint this picture of all the things that are required for a person to do that job in the officer community. We didn’t do that before in the Navy. It was rank and rating and nothing else.
Today we’re doing that, and we’re actually subdividing it even more so that with Ready Relevant Learning you may get just enough to go out and qualify your first watch station, and then after your first deployment or during your first maintenance period, whatever it might be, you go back to a schoolhouse at the fleet concentration area. You don’t have to go travel anywhere to do it. You do another one or two weeks of school and then you get the Bravo code of that Navy enlisted classification.
So progressive NECs, billet-based distribution, that’s going to allow us to make this very accurate DNA print of what it would take to do a particular job at a particular time on a particular platform or job in the Navy. Now we have the same thing on the sailor’s side and when they want to transition we just match up those two DNAs, the requirement versus the resume of the individual, and now we can see where are the gaps. With Ready Relevant Learning being mobile, being modular, being short, being available at fleet center areas, we fill up and make that delta up pretty quick and arm that sailor to succeed in that new rating.
I would tell you that if you really stop and think about it, of our 89 ratings that we have today, there are probably 10 or 12 that right off the top of your head you would say, it’s not a stretch to think with a three week, a three month, pick your time, some amount of training, a sailor in that rank—think about fire control technicians and sonar men in submarines. They’re practically doing the same job on Virginia-class submarines. And with Admiral Roegge’s efforts with IUSS and leveraging sonarmen from the surface community and the aviation community, it’s not a stretch to think as our platform commonality increases: PAs, Virginia-class, third-flight Arleigh Burke destroyers, there are almost identical sonar displays right now.
I would argue that the submarine sonarmen are far better trained. But the point would be that at some point you could even cross platforms. That’s what this is about.
Here’s the job, what it exactly entails, here’s what the sailor has got, here’s a bunch of tools to help make up the delta, and you can move back and forth and do other things. From the sailor’s point of view, they’re going to get—you look at when they go up for a detailing window right now. They’ve got a fixed number of jobs, fixed amount of timing based on where they are right then. If the other occupations are available to them, it’s more jobs, it’s more timing opportunities, it’s more home ports.
Maybe it’s a better advancement opportunity if the area they’re moving into is perhaps undermanned or has less manning than the rate that they’re in now. Maybe it’s even more specialty and incentive-based, so better pay opportunities for them. So the idea is to offer this.
I don’t think it’s going to be a wholesale every sailor will do it. It’s certainly not going to be every sailor must do it, unless we get to that situation where we’re in this unforeseen circumstance where I need to create four new cyber related occupations that we didn’t think of yesterday until the attack happened today. That’s what it’s about, having those mechanisms built in so we can rapidly change.
The reason there aren’t a lot of specifics in the rollout plan is, if any of you read my op-ed, we don’t know yet. We’re working on it and we’re working the sources. We need input to make it executable, to make it work for the sailors, but also to make it work from the Navy’s viewpoint to meet those operational imperatives and to meet those fleet manning needs.
So there’s a lot of work to be done. How will advancement exams work? I don’t know. We may pare down the number of advancement exams we do through things like Meritorious Advancement Program and things of that nature.
We’re on about a five to six year journey here. The first piece was the rating name discussion because ultimately, when you get down to it and you have multiple ratings, what are you going to be called? So let’s use our rank. If there’s any senior enlisted folks in here, take out your ID card. What does it say on it? Does it say, ITCM? It says MCPO.
The other point that frequently comes up is we’ve all got our allegiances to tribes, our ratings, our departments, our divisions, our ships, our squadrons. But when we go out onto the street wearing our uniform, what does the American public see? They see a United States Navy sailor. They recognize those rank names and it resonates with the American people.
The other element of this is the civilian occupational certifica- tion piece. That’s a parallel effort here. As we redefine career fields—today there are 12 career fields. I couldn’t tell you what they are, except for about two of them because most of them are anachronisms. They don’t really apply anymore. Nuclear and Naval Special Warfare make a lot of sense to me. The rest of them don’t.
So we’re looking at redrawing those lines and career group- ings so that ultimately the names of those career groupings or career fields will translate to something that the American public
a) understands; and b) will perhaps give us some reciprocity in terms of credentialing on the outside. You know, we train thousands of air traffic controllers every year and they operate in some pretty intense conditions, yet they get zero credit from the FAA when they leave the Navy. We’re working on that. We’re working with the Department of Labor.
Many of these credentialing things are done at the state level. Even more are done at the municipal level. We’re working catch- as-catch-can at that level, but we’re working with the Board of Governors for reciprocity across the board on many of the jobs that would be certified at the state level.
Ultimately, I think that becomes a tremendous recruiting hook in terms of the potential for civilian occupational certification. It can be a retention hook as well because we’re going to offer certification not just at the apprentice level but at the journeyman and master level as well. So we’ll work that in with the right incentive mixes as we go forward. But the details are left to the student as an exercise, and I’m the student, so I’ve got a lot more work to do yet.
