Officer Retention

[marct]

Hello Sir,

My first post since I joined SWC. By the way, I've enjoyed the exchanges I've read so far and appreciate the thoughtfulness of the comments on serious issues.

Welcome aboard!

My take-away from our experience is that the money, in and of itself, will never bring about a decision to stay for the people you really want to stay, but it will help prep the battlespace for the decision (particularly wrt spouse and family) if you get the amount right and keep it competitive.

What seems to work best in order to keep the best is a blended solution - meaningful operational tours with career recognition for those whose service merits it, advanced education opportunity and maintaining the proper balance between operational time (sea duty for us) and "home" time (shore duty).

I have a suspicion that it also relates to the concept of a "flexible career path". Ever since the demise of the "Organization Man" as a central cultural expectation (~1982 in Canada at the pop culture level), there has been an increasing expectation that each "job" (in the very old sense of the word) will give people new skills and network contacts that will be useful in finding their next "job", even if they stay in the same organization. A lot of recent research in career points to people choosing less money in order to gain favourable skills and network contacts, but only for a limited time (~2-3 years or so).

Many of the high tech firms got around the problem of retention by bypassing their HR departments in both hiring and career decisions. They adopted a mentoring model with hiring/project managers acting as mentors using a very dense network of weak ties as their basis, and this might be a model that the Army may want to adopt, at least in part (basically, it decentralizes a large part of the "individual career growth" responsibilities from HR to informal networks).

Marc