One-stop career development - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

One-stop career development

FORT MONROE, Va. — The Army has developed an ambitious program for soldiers to use a single Internet portal to manage their careers and move toward advancement — and the next promotion.

The Army Career Tracker program, planned for launch in 2010, provides soldiers with a personalized look at training, education and personnel programs they can use to set goals and develop as leaders, according to Jeffrey Colimon, a project officer with the Institute of NCO Professional Development.

Soldiers will use Career Tracker in planning for the new mandatory self-development courses they will need to move up in the ranks.

The new system will allow raters and other leaders to view a soldier’s education, training and assignment history when mentoring and counseling.

Career Tracker also will allow leaders who rate soldiers to get a quick assessment of the professional development status of subordinates. They will also be able to view assignments, training and education courses recommended by the proponent agency, typically a branch service school, for the rated soldier’s career field and military occupational specialty.

Soldiers will not lose their ability to make career decisions, Colimon said. He likened Career Tracker to a compass that “will help them to navigate the system and achieve their goals.”

Career Tracker will be fielded first with enlisted soldiers, with versions for officers and Army civilians to follow in two to three years.

“This is a total solution for active and Reserve enlisted soldiers and officers and civilians,” said Mike Chon, an associate partner with IBM Global Business Services, prime contractor for Career Tracker.

Officials here at Training and Doctrine Command headquarters predict that with the successful outcome of technology demonstrations this fall, Career Tracker will be ready for launch next year.

The demonstrations will be conducted Oct. 26-30 at Fort Gordon, Ga., for selected groups of Signal Corps soldiers and their leaders, and at Fort Bragg, N.C., Nov. 2-6 for Special Forces soldiers.

The plan is to incrementally expand the user population from about 300,000 soldiers after the demonstrations to 1.3 million soldiers, officers and civilians within six to seven years.

Career Tracker is viewed as the Army’s priority leader development initiative for enlisted soldiers because it supports other core initiatives, such as the lifelong learning strategy that takes soldiers from basic training to the Sergeants Major Course and beyond; the redesign of NCO Education System courses; and the introduction of structured and guided self-development programs.

Four of the five Structured Self-Development courses will be prerequisites to attend courses in the NCO Education System and will be mandatory for promotion.

Career Tracker will play a pivotal role because the Army will use the system to enroll soldiers in the Structured Self-Development courses appropriate for their rank and skill level.

In a related initiative, the Army plans to eventually make changes to the semi-centralized promotion system that will feature new point values for soldiers competing for advancement to sergeant and staff sergeant. Career Tracker will be configured to support soldiers in achieving their goals under the new promotion system.

Recruiters will be able to access MOS career maps when counseling prospective soldiers.

As envisioned by system developers, recruiters will collect general information about potential recruits and ACT will provide information on selecting an MOS and career goals.

“We see Career Tracker as an evolving project, along with other changes being made to the NCO Education System,” said retired Command Sgt. Maj. John D. Sparks, director of the Institute for NCO Professional Development.

“I think soldiers are so savvy today in the world of technology, we just have to keep pace with their abilities,” Sparks said of the evolution of Career Tracker, which began in 2005 with a servicewide review of education, training and assignments for leaders.

Surveys conducted for the review showed that soldiers had a difficult time accessing and navigating the Army’s myriad career development support services.

Career Tracker is seen as a marked improvement to the online Professional Development Model, launched four years ago, and DA Pamphlet 600-25, which is the atlas of NCO career maps for each enlisted job specialty.

“The problem with the career maps is that they are not personalized,” Colimon said.

Army Career Tracker is designed to be accessed with a soldier’s Army Knowledge Online credentials and to seamlessly draw information from eight channels that support personnel, training and military and civilian education programs.

When soldiers arrive at Army Career Tracker, they will see a page that is similar in design to the opening page of Army Knowledge Online.

Major subsections include notices on such events as an upcoming promotion board, recommended training courses, the names of their evaluation report rater and any mentors they consult for career decisions. The page also will have links to personnel and education services, such as their Official Military Personnel File and the College of the American Soldier.

A particularly impressive feature of the system called My Career Dashboard provides a quick-scan, color-coded status report on the soldier’s professional goals, NCO Education System progress and civilian education credits.

Search options

Career Tracker is built with commercial off-the-shelf products and has a robust search capability that allows soldiers to draw detailed information from training and education sources they can use in configuring their own goals.

For example, a soldier looking for a college course can use Career Tracker to search the catalogs of schools participating in the College of the American Soldier or the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges Army Degree programs.

In defining a search, the soldier can specify:

• A resident or distance-learning course

• The preferred location for the course if taken in residence

• The maximum number of days he can allocate for the course

•The type of degree he is pursuing

•The number of credits awarded for successful completion of the course.

WHERE CAREER TRACKER GOES

Soldiers will use their Army Knowledge Online sign-in credentials to go to Army Career Tracker, where they will find personalized training, education and assignment information based on input from:

•Human Resources Command and the Integrated Total Army Personnel Data Base for biographical and assignment information.

•Army Training Requirements and Resources System, the Army’s primary system of record for managing soldier input to training. ATRRS maintains a catalog on courses taught by or for soldiers at military and Defense Department institutions.

•GoArmyEd, the Web-based system for processing tuition assistance requests for classroom, distance learning and eArmyU online college courses.

•Army Learning Management System, the primary channel for information on non-ATRRS distance learning courses.

•Army/American Council on Education Registry Transcript System, the primary channel for information on college credits earned through Army Continuing Education.

•Digital Training Management System, the primary channel for accessing unit training history.

•Credentialing Opportunities Online, or COOL, the primary channel for information on earning civilian certifications and licenses for Army training.

•Army Training Information Architecture, the primary channel for information on the Professional Development Model and non-ATRRS resident courses and catalog.

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