Research for Skills

Hands-on performance tests and job knowledge tests were developed for several U/AH-1 helicopter maintenance specialties as part of the Marine Corps Job Performance Measurement Project. The purpose of this information memorandum is to disseminate these performance measures to Marine Corps personnel managers, training instructors, and interested researchers who may find them useful. This work comprises two parts: volume I contains the hands-on performance test, and this volume presents the administrative duties and job knowledge test. See also CIM 95 020001.

Hands-on performance tests are the benchmark against which other measures of proficiency should be compared. However, hands-on performance tests are expensive, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous to personnel or equipment. This paper analyzes the relationship between hands-on performance tests and job-knowledge tests. The study extends previous studies to indicate the conditions under which job-knowledge tests should be used as surrogates and to provide guidance for developing better job-knowledge tests.

The purpose of this paper is to present a rationale for evaluating minimum qualifiying standards that incorporate policy guidance and directives together with data from the Job Performance Measurement (JPM) project. First, policy guidance and directives are discussed and defined more precisely for use in quantitative analyses. The policy statements are then applied to results from the JPM project to compute a minimum qualifying aptitude score for the infantry occupational field.

This research memorandum presents information on Navy Enlisted Classification (NEC) inventories and assignments between 1979 and 1987, and on NEC requirements between 1984 and 1987. It also examines three ratios: the ratio of matched assignments to inventory, the ratio of inventory to requirements, and the ratio of assignments to requirements. The first ratio measures the rate of NEC utilization; the second measures the fraction of requirements that could be filled; and the third measures the fraction of requirements that are being filled. At the aggregate level, the paper discusses values of these variables and ratios in each year and changes in them over time. At the NEC level, it presents distributions of NECs across values of the variables and shifts in the distributions over time.