Research for Job Proficiency

VAdm. Doyle, USN (Ret) and RAdm. Meyer, USN (Ret), among others, have expressed concern to Adm. Kelso, the Chief of Naval Operations, regarding the technical expertise of Navy officers. Their concern is that the decline in officer technical expertise is harming the acquisition process and threatening the capabilities of the U.S. Navy. Adm. Kelso asked CNA to study the issue, and this briefing describes our analysis.

As part of the study Managing the Enlisted Marine Corps in the 1990s, CNA analyzed success patterns of Marines making lateral moves. Each of these Marines retrains in a primary military occupational specialty different from the original one. The Marine Corps currently has no basis for judging the success of Marines initiating lateral moves. Our analysis of historical data provides planners with information to help judge the efficiency of these moves. We will first describe the Marine Corps manpower planning and how lateral moves fit into this planning. We then consider the costs of selective reenlistment bonuses versus lateral moves. Finally, we provide statistical analysis of historical data on lateral moves. Our analysis of lateral moves focuses on the following considerations: (a) patterns of successful completion of a lateral move; (b) the promotion and attrition experience of Marines who have made lateral moves relative to their cohorts; and (c) experience in the Marine Corps compared with performance of occupation-related tasks.

The Marine Corps Job Performance Measurement (JPM) project was a long term research effort to develop objective measures of job performance and to relate these measures to the aptitude test used for military selection. The second phase of the project focused on mechanical maintenance specialties: automotive and helicopter mechanics. This research memorandum documents the ability of scores from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to predict several measures of mechanical maintenance performance: hands-on performance tests, job knowledge tests, initial skill training course grades, and supervisor ratings. We examined tradeoffs between aptitude and job experience in predicting job performance. We also derived aptitude standards for these mechanical maintenance specialties based on the hands-on performance criterion. The Marine Corps JPM project succeeded in developing reliable, objective, and representative measures of mechanical maintenance job performance. The results from the project provide the Marine Corps with convincing empirical evidence that demonstrates the strong link between performance on the ASVAB and future performance in selected mechanical maintenance jobs.

This memorandum reports the procedures used for the development and scoring of hands-on performance tests for the mechanical maintenance phase of the Job Performance Measurement project.