Creating Innovative Career Paths
Published Date: January 1, 2006
Career paths and compensation are ideally tailored to fit the requirements of specific occupational fields and individual workers. Different skills and occupations call for different pay as well as different amounts of in-house training, career lengths, and assignment patterns. In the military, however, career paths and the structure of compensation tend to be rigid and the basic outlines have persisted since before the beginning of the All-Volunteer Force. Most analysts and policy-makers agree that the future Navy will consist of more technologically advanced platforms organized to have a more agile fleet. This fleet will call for a smaller, more experienced workforce that spends more time in operational billets. If these predictions are correct, substantial changes must occur in manpower, personnel, and training systems. It will be necessary to have more innovative career paths. In this paper, we will first show that the Navy workforce is more junior than its nonmilitary counterpart. We will then review literature that shows that this has already created problems. Next, we argue that future changes will make it even more compelling to undertake reforms needed to create a more experienced force. Then we will explore some possible reforms to create innovative career paths.
