MINDING THE GAP


TRACKING WHO DOES WHAT


The Army DACM Office continues to gather second- and third-order informa- tion on the skills and knowledge of the AAW, following up on the Competency and Career Development Assess- ment in 2017. (Image by USAASC)


post, chief of the Strategy and Commu- nications Division, just recently. She is passionate about the Army Acquisition Workforce Human Capital Strategic Plan, created in FY17, which she manages.


“In that plan, we talk about professional development. We didn’t have any way to assess the professional development of the Army Acquisition Workforce,” she said, so it made sense to launch a compe- tency assessment that would evaluate the workforce in accordance with the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Acquisition Workforce Qualification Initiative. Tat initiative is an employee development tool used to identify specific gaps in job experi- ence along with on-the-job developmental opportunities and to capture demon- strated acquisition experience.


Assessment results told the DACM Office how employees in each of the acquisition career fields fared in terms of under- standing a skill, the amount of time an employee spent on that skill and the importance of that skill in the employee’s


112 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2019


position. “So we learned, per acquisition career field, how they matched up to those Workforce Qualification Initiative compe- tencies” from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Sable said.


Te DACM Office provided the assess- ment data to Army acquisition functional leaders and acquisition functional advisers during quarterly Human Capital Strate- gic Plan council and functional integrated team meetings.


Te Army has functional integrated prod- uct teams that represent each acquisition career field. Meetings of those teams enable functional leaders, functional advis- ers, Defense Acquisition University (DAU) and the DACM Office to address DAWIA certification tenets and career development for each acquisition career field.


Army acquisition functional leaders are civilians at the Senior Executive Service level who are responsible for the health and management of a specific acquisition career field, while advisers are experts on a


specific acquisition career field who repre- sent the functional leader for that field, as partners with the Army DACM Office, Sable explained.


Te assessment data will help leaders and advisers better understand the gaps in their designated acquisition career fields, she added. Te functional leaders and advisers are a new leadership concept that ensures Senior Executive Service-level leadership, along with subject matter and DACM Office career development exper- tise, focused as a team on the health of the workforce within a specific career field. In addition, there is now specific emphasis on the eight life cycle focuses of human capital, from the beginning to the end of an acquisition career and everything that impacts that career along the way.


Te eight focus areas are:


• Structure (workforce shaping and plan- ning, Military Acquisition Position List).


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