By Argie Sarantinos-Perrin
Building and sustaining an educated, professional workforce is a key mission for Army Acquisition leaders in order to provide superior capabilities and support to U.S. Soldiers. In support of this mission, the Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T) recently rolled out a new online training dashboard that tracks training and certifications across its workforce.
The user-friendly dashboard displays the training and certification status of each organization within the PEO, providing leaders with detailed information on military and civilian employees’ development as they work toward completing required education and certification levels.
“The training dashboard is a very well designed, easy-to-use tool that I use to look across the PEO and see where we are meeting the requirements—and if we’re not on track, we can see where we need to improve,” said Mary Woods, deputy program executive officer for PEO C3T. “The training dashboard is a great tool that can be adopted by other groups in the acquisition community, and it can be modified to track training for other parts of the Army, too.”
The Career Acquisition Personnel and Position Management Information System (CAPPMIS) dashboard provides information in three key areas—continuous learning points (CLPs), individual development plans (IDPs) and acquisition certifications. CLPs are earned by attending classes, training courses, professional activities, conferences or symposiums. IDPs map out an employee’s career path, including any training requirements necessary to reach specific goals. Together, these areas round out the skills and education that the Army Acquisition workforce needs in order to support the Soldier.
The emphasis on acquisition certification began in 1990 with the implementation of the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA), which requires all acquisition workforce members to be certified in their career field. A forum made up of general officer and Senior Executive Service leaders, along with the Army’s Director of Acquisition Career Management, Lt. Gen. Bill Phillips, monitor, review and champion DAWIA certification for the workforce.
Ensuring that PEO C3T complies with these standards, the business intelligence team at PEO C3T’s Military Technical (MilTech) Solutions Office developed the CAPPMIS dashboard. The dashboard enables managers to keep employees on track by providing 30, 60 and 90 day windows of when acquisition certifications are due, as well as when IDPs were most recently updated. It also shows whether employees are on track to earn the 80 CLPs that are required every two years.
The dashboard has also been adopted by the Systems Engineering and Integration Directorate, the Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center and the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare & Sensors (PEO IEW&S), whose leaders praised the ability to efficiently monitor the records of employees who work at remote locations.
“We have people in Huntsville, Ala., Fort Belvoir, Va., Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. and numerous other locations, so we have to coordinate people in different time zones,” said Patricia San Agustin, management analyst for PEO IEW&S. “Since acquisition training is a very high priority for our organization, the training dashboard is a great tool because of the fine detail that it gives you.”
The tool eliminates the need for individual project managers to request training information, since the dashboard is accessible at any time and updated every two weeks with new information from the CAPPMIS database.
Using the CAPPMIS dashboard enables PEO C3T to efficiently align with the priority to train, build and sustain an educated acquisition workforce, and ultimately provide better support to the Soldier.
