Sailors and civilians
Unlike sailors, Navy civilians get little in the way of career training and guidance. The service's personnel chief says that's about to change.
If a young lieutenant in the Navy wants to become a battle group commander, there is no shortage of older officers to act as mentors, plenty of leadership training courses available and a well-established trail of assignments to compete for on the road to becoming a fleet leader.
But a newly hired Navy GS-7 employee aiming for the top ranks of the agency's civilian leadership has no built-in mentors, few management training opportunities and minimal career guidance.
That's about to change, according to the Navy's new personnel chief, Vice Adm. Gerald Hoewing. "I don't think we have done a good job in developing our civilians and we are going to turn that around," he told Government Executive recently.
Like its sister services, the Navy has well-established career paths and training programs in place for its uniformed members. Hoewing, who became chief of Navy personnel in October, said the service would use its existing training programs for uniformed members and a handful of training efforts already in place for civilians in the acquisition and accounting fields as models for developing career programs for all civilian personnel.
The Navy recently established the Civilian Community Management Division within the Office of the Chief of Naval Personnel to create growth and development programs for all the Navy's 185,000 civilians from Pentagon accountants to shipyard mechanics. The organization, headed by a Senior Executive Service member, will include "community managers" for 20 Navy civilian career tracks, ranging from intelligence to public affairs. These GS-14 and GS-15 managers will define civilian career paths, establish training programs and create a mentoring system for all civilian career fields.
Hoewing said the new organization would become a clearinghouse for training programs and tracking civilians' career development. Community managers will also serve as mentors in their career fields by taking questions and offering advice to civilian employees over the telephone or via the Web. The new center should be staffed with representatives from all civilian career fields within the next six months, Hoewing said.
There's a clear readiness payoff to focusing on civilians, according to Hoewing. "It will make our civilians perform at higher levels because they are getting more training and education that is focused on their mission areas, and that ultimately will allow our military to perform at higher levels."
Hoewing also has an ambitious agenda for better managing service members. Above all, he said, the Navy must do a better job of "aligning its force to mission" by recruiting sailors for key jobs and retraining existing sailors to fill positions where there may be shortfalls. After cutting 38 percent of uniformed members following the Cold War, the Navy no longer needs to shed personnel and must now focus on having the right skills mix, Hoewing said.
As part of that effort, acquisition managers and weapons contractors will be asked to consider personnel as they develop new weapon systems. "We believe if you include manpower upfront in the design criteria and you design equipment for lower manpower, that is a huge savings. So acquisition reform needs to take at look at manpower as a key performance parameter," he added.
For example, the Navy has already included diagnostic equipment on fighter planes that can predict when systems will break down, to reduce the need for extensive inspections by mechanics. And in developing its next generation of destroyer class of ships, known as DD(X), the Navy has cut personnel requirements for the ship by nearly 50 percent by making use of advanced technologies.
Hoewing said the Navy must also replace a hodgepodge of human resources databases developed over the past three decades with a single enterprise-wide system for tracking and maintaining records on all sailors. By no later than 2006, he said, sailors will be able to access service and training records, update resumes, monitor performance reviews and track their career development through a single Web site.
Strong personnel management in both the uniformed military and the civilian ranks is key to the warfighting success of the Navy, Hoewing said. "Everything we do in the personnel business is to make sure we have the personnel readiness to do our mission."