WORKFORCE
“While we do have a fairly robust database of sorts, a source database for the majority of personnel information, it doesn’t allow us to drill down into a lot of things you want to know.”
• Acquisition (recruitment and hiring for civilians, accessing and reclassifying for officers and noncommissioned officers).
• Distribution (placement in an acquisition position). • Deployment (in the military sense, this means exactly what it
says; in the civilian sense, it could be the same, or it could be a broadening assignment or the like).
• Development (training, leader development, education programs).
• Sustainment (retention incentives). • Compensation (recognition incentives and pay, etc.). • Transition (attrition).
IDENTIFY THE GAPS Te second round of the assessment—which workforce members can expect to be launched this spring, with full results in the fall—will be targeted at supervisors in order to corroborate the responses on the previous baseline assessment, said Jason Pitts, chief of the Acquisition Workforce Proponency Branch. Pitts’ branch is responsible for coordinating with OSD, other services and DAU to advocate on education, training and experience stan- dards for certification. If supervisors acknowledge the same skill gaps that the overall workforce did in the first round of the assess- ment, then Pitts can confirm an identified gap.
Pitts and his team worked closely with the functional leaders to focus the second round of the assessment, soliciting feedback from those leaders on what they needed to know about the workforce. Because there can be numerous competencies in a career field, Pitts asked them to select the top 18 skill gaps from each acqui- sition career field that they wanted to focus on.
“I think that will give us a really good picture of what the gaps are, by acquisition career field, by grade, which is the key part,”
he said. Te DACM Office will again share the results with the functional leaders and functional advisers, and with various commands, at the Human Capital Strategic Plan council meet- ings and at functional integrated product team meetings. “Tey get to see what the gaps are so they can recommend training to their own people, but at the same time we can use [the results] to shape our centrally run programs and how we use DAWDF [the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund],” Pitts said.
Te data that the assessment provides will help to inform any decisions functional leaders make regarding their designated acquisition career field, and help them understand its current state of health, Sable said. “And if we can understand the health of each acquisition career field … then we can improve the state of health of the overall acquisition workforce,” she said.
Once the assessment analysis is complete and the functional lead- ers know where the skill gaps are, they can help the DACM Office develop ways to provide education, training or experiential assign- ments to fill those gaps.
Pitts hopes that, in the future, competencies can be added to individual development plans and the Career Acquisition Management Portal, so that supervisors and employees can not only assess an employee’s skills but also generate reports, though that goal is a few years away. Meanwhile, the DACM Office is working toward improving the health of the acquisition work- force, learning from best practices in other services and industry to help focus its efforts, Sable said.
“So when questions are asked at town halls that were specific like that, we are working toward getting to that point where we have an answer for any kind of question that has to do with acquisi- tion career development,” she said. “We are set up for success and ensuring a trusted team of acquisition professionals.”
For more information, see the “Army Acquisition Functional Leader and Army Acquisition Functional Advisor Policy” at https://asc.
army.mil/web/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/AAFL-and- AAFA-Policy-4-Sep-2018.pdf.
JACQUELINE M. HAMES is a writer and editor with Army AL&T magazine. She holds a B.A.
in creative writing from
Christopher Newport University. She has more than 10 years of experience writing and editing for the military, with seven of those years spent producing news and feature articles for publication.
https://asc.ar my.mil
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