Terry Gerton We have talked about military personnel in many ways here and we’ve heard for years that, even from places like Rand, the military needs to do a better job of matching people to jobs. Why is that so hard to actually do?

Julia Brown Well, I think it’s that traditional personnel systems were built around broad categories. So things like occupational specialties, rank, and these experiential milestones. These are very important factors, but they don’t tell the full story of what an individual can actually contribute. Especially now when military jobs have become increasingly complex and specialized, we really need to understand the full capabilities of the individual service members. And historically, we just haven’t had a scalable way to capture all of that information and maintain it over time.

Terry Gerton What kind of special skills are you talking about here? Are you thinking language skills, specific training or, you know, quantifiable skills?

Julia Brown All of those, and really from the behavioral science perspective, any skill can be quantified. So we’re talking about things like anything from emotional intelligence to adaptability, tactical decision-making, and technical skills as well. Really the gamut of all of the different capabilities that a person can bring to a job.

Terry Gerton Then from your perspective, your background, what’s different now? What makes tracking those kinds of qualifications something that the military personnel system could actually operationalize instead of just study?

Julia Brown I think there’s a few things that are different now. In terms of the increases in our technological capabilities, we just have more access to data. And then with the inventions within AI, we have better ways to consolidate all of that data and understand the various patterns from it. So there are factors that we’ve really been collecting over time, but it’s the scalability and the synthesization of the data that now is really affording these opportunities to understand the patterns and then better understand individual capabilities.

Terry Gerton We had a conversation a few weeks ago about a question the Air Force was struggling with about trying to manage folks with Chinese language competency. If that was a question that you were trying to track, how would you actually do it?

Julia Brown Sure, so there’s a variety of different ways and really the multimodal assessments and multimodal methods of being able to track this is really the key here. So we have great language assessments but we can also observe people speaking Chinese in actual context. We can see, are they fluent in their conversational skills? Are they fluent in their understanding, their reading? We can look at their performance during training. And capture that. So being able to pull things from personnel records, like previous assessments that they’ve done, observations from training courses, observations in actual operational environments and pulling all of those different data sources together to make a better estimate of that person’s capability.

Terry Gerton And your work then takes that, I would guess, one step further and talks about competency modeling. How do you measure competency when you take in all of those different data points?

Julia Brown So In terms of competencies, we look at competencies as a broad category for the knowledge, skills, and abilities that somebody is able to perform. Within each competency, you have various proficiency levels. On any given competency, someone can range anywhere from beginner to expert in it. Oftentimes, we have about four levels, but that can change depending on the organization. In addition to having these definitions of the competencies including the knowledge, skills and abilities that are contained within that category, you also have behavioral indicators at each level. So by having these real indicators that can be observed, then it’s a lot easier to be able to track this is the level at which somebody is on this competency.

Terry Gerton And are those things that just can be measured in the course of someone doing their normal duty or do you have to have regular measurement sessions to kind of collect that data so that you can assess competency growth and development?

Julia Brown Yes, definitely both. The real power here is to have the different inputs to kind of form that overall estimate of where somebody is on a given competency. So that should absolutely grow over time and having a constant stream of data adding towards that is really what makes this methodology very powerful.

Terry Gerton Julia Brown is senior scientist and portfolio lead at Aptima. Julia, I think the power here is not only establishing an individual’s competency and certain skills, but then connecting that to the assignment process. So walk us through how what you’re doing connects to assignments, how the military can then maybe optimize best fit for the position.

Julia Brown Yeah, absolutely. So at a high level, what we’re doing is really building a richer understanding of both sides of the equation. That is on the side of the individual and a profile that reflects the various competencies, skills, experience and qualifications that they have demonstrated over time. And then on the position side, we also define the capabilities required for successful performance. The system then takes those things and competencies provide that common language to do so and compares the profiles and identifies areas of alignments. So instead of asking traditionally, does this person belong to the right career field? It’s how closely does this persons capability profile align with what this mission set and this position actually requires. So we surface all of that information within this assignments process, but we still very importantly rely on human judgment to be the final decision makers to evaluate this broader pool of candidates and uncover what the strong matches might be.

Terry Gerton Within the military, there’s a tension between someone having deep and narrow expertise in a particular space and someone having a very broad exposure to lots of areas. And especially when you’re thinking about leader development, oftentimes you want someone that has a little bit of both. They’re fairly competent in one particular area, but they’ve also had a number of broadening assignments. How do you balance that in the models that you’re thinking of? General competency, leadership attributes versus specific skill competency.

Julia Brown Absolutely, so we can categorize these groups of competencies then into more foundational competencies that any service wants service members to have that reflect that service’s core identity, their core values. Also leadership competencies and then technical competencies as well. What having this kind of mapping or framework of competences does is you can see where an individual is developing. And In terms of workforce analytics too, you can also plan ahead to see what is the health of the pipeline within this career field even. So do we have enough people that are building these technical capabilities? And when we have the positions that are also aligned with the competency framework, we can see if I put them in this position, what opportunities do they have to grow in a given area? Are they growing their leadership competencies here? Is this a broadening assignment? Or are they getting more deep technical experience? And what does the service need?

Terry Gerton The military personnel management system is very much an Industrial Age approach. You get cohorts of people, you move them through different paths and career assignments, and they make certain ranks at certain times or they don’t. So how is the knowledge that you’re gaining through this competency model going to change the industrial age general personnel model so that we can really focus on the individual, that’s gonna change career progressions and conceptions of career advancement, isn’t it?

Julia Brown I think so. I think this framework really adds to the individual and their development capabilities because if you can see where you want to go within a given service and then what competencies are required to get to that position, and then you have learning resources that are tied to those competencies, you can say what other assignments can I take that can help me build to this assignment that I want. We’re trying to take out the linear trajectory of this career path and allow for more broader experiences. And by providing that autonomy and flexibility to service members, our hope is that it helps to retain them and to give them more control over where they want to go and more authority to say, this is the thing that I want to build. And so these are the steps that I can take to get there.

Terry Gerton How are you seeing this new approach play out on the ground in the military services?

Julia Brown I think that it still requires a lot of human oversight and it will, but what it’s doing is it’s surfacing a lot larger amounts of data to provide for the decision makers to make better informed decisions. We still very much rely on our leaders to make those decisions. There will always be a lag in the data that are needed to make some of these personnel decisions, but it can lead to better informed decisions and faster identification of qualified candidates and then the greater ability to align talent with the mission requirements.

Terry Gerton And if we follow this approach over time, what would you expect to be different two to five years in the future?

Julia Brown I think if this is working well, then commanders and personnel managers have greater visibility into the talent available to them. So instead of searching through lots of records and relying on primarily these broad qualifications, they can see a richer picture of capabilities and across their workforce. So I think we’ll see more of putting the right person in the right job, at the right time. And that’s really driven by the changes and advances in the behavioral sciences, competency modeling, and AI that are allowing us to do that at scale.