You can take this 45-minute training course and if you get a score, you can move on to the next thing. “The platforms are available 24/7, you can hop on … it’s almost like a video game, so this is something that entices a lot of the younger folks. What we’re going to try to do is leverage these more innovative ways that industry and academia are training their workforces,” Shone said. What skills do they have today? Then we want to start to entice or incentivize them to start gaining the skills that we want them to have for the future, and we’re not going to go the old traditional way of sending someone off to a two and a half year school. So one of Quantum Leap’s first steps will be to try to get a better handle on what skills its employees already have that might be unknown to the Army, or are underutilized. The Army is deliberately using the word “reskill,” rather than “recertify.” Officials said formal IT certification programs will still play a role in the future IT and cyber workforce, but the Army is more interested in real-world skills. So we might reduce some telecommunications folks, some library technicians, some things that are a little bit less of a priority in that information age.”
“And we’re going to have to make some tough decisions on some occupational series we’re going to have to reduce, because this is not something where we’re just going to ask for more people to solve the problem.
“We’re going to prioritize the skills that we’re lacking the most, which are very much in that information age area - things like data managers, systems analysts, application software developers,” he said during AFCEA International’s Army Signal Conference this week.
In addition, Michael Weaver, the professor of contract management at ProPricer will provide an industry perspective. Insight by ProPricer: During this webinar James Woolsey, the president of the Defense Acquisition University, Frank Kelley, the vice president of the Defense Acquisition University and Michelle Currier, the professor of contract management at the Defense Acquisition University, will discuss the future of DoD contracting, pricing and acquisition. The Army, Shone said, is taking the problem one piece at a time, with an initial goal of retraining about a thousand employees between now and 2023. Reskilling thousands of employees and changing their job descriptions won’t happen overnight. “It’s not just a realization that we have the wrong set of skills for what we’ll need in the future, it’s about what can we do to get there.” “We’ve faced the fact that that workforce is currently not skilled to meet the emerging requirements of the future, and we’re going to need different skills five, eight, ten years from now,” said Bryan Shone, the director for policy and resources in the Army CIO’s office. Although the Army’s broader people strategy is meant to address the entire talent management lifecycle, including acquiring new talent, Quantum Leap is specifically focused on the 15,000 people who are already part of the cyber and IT management workforce. Over the next several years, the Army plans to recode thousands of positions and reskill and upskill the people who currently hold them via a new project called Quantum Leap. In at least some respects, the Army’s IT workforce may end up leading the way.
As part of its new “ people strategy,” the Army said it wants to transform its approach to its civilian workforce through long-term focus on talent management.