The Changing Nature of Work Implications for Occupational Analysis (1999) / Chapter Skim
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6 Army Work and Approaches to Occupational Analysis
6 Army Work and Approaches to Occupational Analysis
Pages 216-262
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From page 216... ...
However, before examining the Army in the context of this framework, it is important to recognize the similarities and differences between the Army and employers in the civilian sector. KEY FEATURES OF ARMY MISSION AND EMPLOYMENT Understanding the nature of work in the Army means first understanding the nature of the Army.
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Army personnel are currently governed by a highly structured set of rules and regulations. Some of these rules are presented below as a means for drawing distinctions between the Army and the civilian sectors.
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Second, Army enlisted personnel serve fixed terms of service, although the Army has experienced a first-term attrition rate (that is, recruits who fad] to complete their first obligated term of service)
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In fact, during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, a "stop loss" action was initiated in order to postpone the discharge of active-duty personnel, regardless of scheduled transitions, expired terms of service, or retirement. The greatest distinction between the Army and the civilian workforce is one of culture.
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Although the Army and the other services have continued distinctive organizational practices based on rank and discipline, there are those who believe that changes are coming (Moskos and Wood, 1988; Moskos, 1992; Segal, 1993~. These researchers suggest that, because the all-volunteer nature of the force requires competition with the civilian sector for employees, military jobs will become more like civilian jobs in order to appeal to potential recruits.
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The end of conscription and the later conclusion of the cold war have also been identified as seminal events in transforming the very nature of the U.S. armed forces.
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EXTERNAL CONTEXTS OF WORK This section presents a brief discussion of trends in demographics, missions, and technology and their roles in influencing the structure and content of Army occupations. These forces need to be taken into account by occupational analysts in the Army in the same way that similar forces in the civilian sector are considered in the development and use of occupational analysis systems for civilian work.
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Department of Defense, 1997~. Third, in 1973, white men of European descent accounted for about 75 percent of Army active-duty enlisted personnel and 9 in 10 officers; by the mid-199Os, these proportions had declined to 44 percent of the enlisted force and 66 percent of officers (Defense Manpower Data Center, 1998; U.S.
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have risen across the board. The Army's smaller career force has also extended its efforts to recruit enlisted personnel who are somewhat older than the traditional 18- or 19-year-old youth fresh out of high school.
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This particular trend has been accompanied by a more equitable sharing of parental responsibilities between men and women which, along with certain demographic changes, has forced all employers to take greater interest in developing responsive workplace policies and a more family-friendly working environment. More civilian employers are thus implementing flexible work schedules and jobsharing plans, offering expanding opportunities for people to work at home, placing greater emphasis on participatory management, and introducing new compensation packages tailored to the needs of individual workers and their families.
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of Army personnel relative to that of the U.S. population.
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Functional support and administration 13.336.216.6 (6) Electrical/mechanical equipment repairers 14.68.313.7 (7)
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In fact, the combination of three areas functional support and administration, medical/dental specialists, and service and supply handlers accounts for over two-thirds of Army enlisted women (compared with less than one-third of their male counterparts)
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are not unrepresented. As Table 6.4 indicates, TABLE 6.4 Number and Percentage of Military Occupations with 10 or More Personnel That Have No Women, by Service and Officer/Enlistecl Status, 1 996 Service OfficerEnlistedTotal Army All occupations 188250438 No women 193554 Percent 10.214.012.4 Navy All occupations 5269991,525 No women 104263367 Percent 19.826.424.1 Marine Corps All occupations 123316439 No women 4964113 Percent 39.920.325.8 Air Force All occupations 257243500 No women 291746 Percent 11.37.09.2 Total All occupations 1,0941,8082,902 No women 201379580 Percent 18.421.020.0 SOURCE: Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, Utilization of Women Indicator Report (Monterey, CA: Defense Manpower Data Center/Naval Postgraduate School, 30 September 1996)
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Navy, or the U.S. Department of Defense as a whole even though women are prohibited from serving in ground combat operations, in which 30 percent of Army enlisted personnel can be found.
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in functional support; this compares with 38 percent of whites, who comprise 58 percent of enlisted personnel as a whole. Aside from this disparity as well as in the area of communications and intelligence specialists for whites and blacks levels of racial/ethnic representation in Army occupations are reasonably close to the proportions found in the entire enlisted force.
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Whites are most overrepresented as general officers, scientists and professionals, and, to a lesser extent, tactical operations officers. Migration Between Primary and Duty Occupations Most studies of military enlisted personnel by occupational category use the service member's primary occupation, or formal area of occupational training, to identify his or her military occupational specialty.
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Almost 16 percent of Army personnel who received infantry-related training as their primary occupational specialty were assigned to some other type of occupation as of 1997. At the same time, 12 percent of personnel trained in functional support and administration were performing some other job; the mismatch of primary and duty occupations for the entire enlisted force that year was 9 percent.
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SOURCE: Derived from special tabulations provided by the Defense Manpower Data Center. by more refined (two-digit)
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of defining occupations. A similar situation exists in the civilian sector, in which workers are more actively moving within anc!
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Since 1990 there have been 27 major deployments, representing a 16-fold increase, and almost all of them have involved joint operations of U.S. services (U.S.
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Technological Change Some of the changes in work in the military parallel changes in the civilian sector that result from advances in technology. In both sectors, technology has reduced the number of blue-collar jobs and increased the number of technical and professional jobs.
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Given the range of battlefield innovations, it will be possible for the individual soldier to be more autonomous while still relying on close teamwork with unit members. For example, fire teams comprised of three soldiers will continue to be the basic infantry combat unit and will constitute a strongly interdependent team.
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Such information is projected to involve highfidelity images, accurate friend or foe location and identification, smart decision aids, and intelligent filters to reduce, organize, and digest the high volumes of data flowing through the system. It is also anticipated that the future will see new and upgraded applications of information technology for combat support services, such as equipment and system maintenance, logistics, and training.
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The active Army provides a forward presence and an initial rapid response to emergencies; the Reserves and the National Guard provide a pool of trained individuals for active duty in time of war or other emergencies that can act as reinforcements for contingency operations. In today's environment, the two reserve components are being exercised and deployed to a greater
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A further breakdown in shown in Figure 6.3; it shows that the National Guard provides 55 percent of the combat troops, 33 percent of the combat support units, and 26 percent of the combat service support units. Currently there are 8 combat divisions and 15 separate brigades in the National Guard.
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According to a recent study (Grissmer et al., 1994) , the percentage of individuals in the Army Reserves and the National Guard with no prior service experience was approximately 60 percent for the enlisted force; for commissioned officers, these percentages were 45 for the Army Reserve and 60 percent for the National Guard.
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training is provided. Both the National Guard and the Army Reserves receive 39 days of training a year, far less than the training of those on active duty.
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The central question is: Do the current structures and the analysis tools used to design jobs and training programs support the present and future needs of the Army? Occupational Classification in the Army The personnel of the active Army, the Army National Guard, and the Army Reserves are all classified and managed according to a common set of occupational categories.
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Every MOS has a promotion structure and a description of the tasks, skill qualifications, training and time in rank requirements associated with every enlisted rank. Enlisted personnel are assigned to an MOS when they enter the Army.
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Department of Labor's Dictionary of Occupational Tities, more than 75 percent of military jobs have one or more counterparts in the civilian economy. The career management fields vary in size the three largest are infantry (49,837)
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Once these requirements are defined, the force (including National Guard and Reserve units) can be configured and sized to best meet the requirements.
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Total Army Personnel Command, providing information on rank, time in rank, training, special skills, location, and time at location. These files are used in conjunction with information on spaces to be filled at each level, in each MOS, and at each geographic location to make decisions about promotion, training, and distribution of enlisted personnel.
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a part of the information technology that must be used to speedily identify, locate, and assign large numbers of personnel for specific missions. If these missions are joint, this increases the desirability of a work structure that describes jobs, people, and missions in a common language.
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Stress response and soldier adaptability may be very important descriptors for all officers and enlisted personnel Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1997; U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1996; Reimer,1997c)
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The Force XXI Operations document (1994) identifies Army battlefield requirements through the year 2010 and suggests that the smaller force will have fewer individual specialties for both officers and enlisted soldiers, and individual soldiers will be trained for a wider variety of missions.
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The Army's current job classification system distinguishes between electronic equipment repairers and electrical/mechanical equipment repairers; there are currently twice as many of the latter than the former. However this level of distinction is far too coarse.
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Military experts endorse the notion that future technology will require not only continued employment of human warfighters, but also higher levels of skill (Sanders, 1997:3~. In addition, the Army's future work structure will have to contend with the fact that workers who deal with information technology must keep up with a staggering rate of growth in the relevant knowledge base.
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New Organizational Structures and Processes In the civilian sector, the conventional management hierarchical pyramid is being flattened to provide faster information flow horizontally and from the top down and from the bottom up (Osborne, 1997~. Reducing the number of organizational levels promotes teamwork, speeds product development, and allows flexible, rapid response to market changes.
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Such explorations are likely to benefit from investigation of new work structures being developed in association with the concept of computer-supported cooperative work, in which teams work together using common information-processing and distribution systems, while individual tasks are allocated dynamically based on overall team actions, performance, and requirements (National Research Council, 1998~. Army work structures in the future are likely to benefit from inclusion of detailed descriptors for team tasks and knowledge, skills, and abilities.
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In 1996, the Army Research Institute's occupational analysis group stated its goal (U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1996:00~: The mission of the Occupational Analysis Program is to provide the Army's manpower, personnel, and training communities the individual task information critical to job design, analysis, and training development.
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ODARS has been used with some success in characterizing changing task requirements in selected MOSs and for developing responsive and targeted training programs (U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1996~.
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The specific characteristics of an ideal Army Personnel Network (AP*
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260 to .
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Includes a taxonomy of missions and linkages among missions, work activities, skills, and knowledge. Uses a common language developed through extensive literature reviews and analyses.
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For example, O* NET_ uses a common language, includes a comprehensive set of personnel characteristic descriptors and crossjob descriptors, uses hierarchically organized descriptors, provides a process for gathering occupation specific descriptors, includes civilian jobs, and is planned for on-line automation.
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