by Site Staff
July 28, 2006
A recurring news item of late has been about branches of the U.S. military missing their annual recruiting goals, instigating fears of a manpower shortage in the services. Particularly stretched in terms of personnel is the Army National Guard, which has gone above and beyond its traditional mission to put more boots on the ground in U.S. theaters of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, this strain has led the Army National Guard to invest heavily in recruitment and retention.
“Our contemporary operational environment is extremely high,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Duane Jahner, chief of the Army National Guard Strength Maintenance Training Center. “What the Army National Guard is facing — and all the services for that matter — is the extremely difficult task of trying to recruit young Americans. We’re throwing a lot of resources and personnel into that.”
One way in which they’re advancing their recruitment and retention efforts is by equipping the personnel responsible for this mission with the requisite core competencies through training. “Our mission statement here is that the strength maintenance training center is committed to developing and delivering quality, relevant training that positively impacts the end strength of the Army National Guard,” Jahner said. “We break it up by recruiting and retention commands within each state.”
Unlike in the U.S. Army, which has personnel solely focused on recruitment, the Army National Guard has staff working on recruiting and retaining soldiers. “Right now, the force consists of 5,100 recruiting and retention NCOs (non-commissioned officers) along with support staff and leadership, so we’re looking at a force of about 7,000,” Jahner said. “We get their career path started by training them up in our MOS (military occupational specialty) 79T. Training them involves a three-tenet mission. We not only train them to recruit them, but we also train them what they need to know for retention and then attrition management for those who have been identified as at-risk soldiers who might want to leave the Army National Guard.”
Recruitment and retention (R&R) education is delivered in three main ways: e-learning, resident training and mobile training teams sent to all 54 states and territories in which the Army National Guard operates. “For years in the military, it was podium training with subject-matter experts standing in front and delivering the material,” said James Holmes, deputy chief of training development for the Strength Maintenance Training Center. “But as time has gone on, we’ve actually moved more toward e-learning.”
Nearly 2,200 new R&R NCOs — more than three times the typical annual total — were trained during the fiscal year 2005. Additionally, about 6,600 soldiers went through courses delivered by the mobile training teams in the same year. Satisfaction rates for Strength Maintenance Training Center training are very high, Jahner said. After each course, the center runs surveys that ask if it provided learners with the tools and skills necessary to do the job. According to Jahner, some courses have received 99 percent favorable responses in this regard. “By using all those methods — getting away from a lecture format and using distance learning, student-led learning and scenario-based training — they become combat multipliers,” he said. “We can’t be everywhere, yet our demand is so high that we’ve got to deliver different methods to make sure that it gets to the target audience. We need to get more flexible and balanced.”
“The states will call us for mobile training teams, and what we do is package the training according to their needs,” Holmes added. “What they’re facing in Alabama probably isn’t the same as they’re facing in North Dakota. So we have to be able to adapt to that audience and get them the training they need that produces the results they expect.”
Regardless of location, though, a large element of the curricula focuses on communication. R&R personnel have to interface on a regular basis with educators, parents, students and soldiers. Therefore, it’s necessary to educate them on how to initiate a dialogue with all of these groups and foster open interaction, Jahner said. “We developed our comprehensive communications skills, which in our business is the sales package that we throw out there to get these people trained to speak to the public. We’re getting younger soldiers out there. We’re getting soldiers who have already gone through deployment, so they’re able to react to questions that parents and educators have about deployments and ‘what if?’ We do the generational training so they can ID and understand which generation comes from what era so they can adjust to that and relate to what they’re going through.”
–Brian Summerfield, brians@clomedia.com