Armor, intelligence and some quartermaster troops will test a new assignment market system that launches this summer and is scheduled to go service-wide in January 2021, according to an Army news service release.

The Assignment Satisfaction Key-Enlisted Marketplace pilot program will launch in June, but was already tested by a smaller group of armor branch noncommissioned officers last year.

The enlisted program matches up roughly with a similar officer marketplace already in use. The Army’s talent management initiatives began with the officer corps, because the population is much smaller and easier to run trials on than the enlisted force, according to Sgt. Maj. Wardell Jefferson, the Army G-1’s senior enlisted soldier.

“The officers have got a great foundation ... but the biggest difference for us is the population with the enlisted force,” Jefferson previously told Army Times. “We have upwards of about 400,000 enlisted soldiers, so we’re trying to find something that’s manageable and sustainable.”

The pilot program could provide enlisted troops more choice in their careers than the current assignment system, which forces troops to choose six basing options — three in the United States and three overseas, Jefferson explained during a Facebook Town Hall on Monday.

The new system is expected to allow soldiers to rank order more assignment preferences. Army leaders have said that the marketplace will stabilize enlisted soldiers’ careers by weighing their preferences more in the assignment process and ensuring good soldiers are retained rather than lost to the civilian sector.

“I feel this is definitely going to help with retention,” Jefferson said earlier this winter. “As we travel around talking to soldiers, one of the things they ask for is having more input in their careers and this is going to give them that input. More soldiers are going to get assigned to a location that them and their families want to be at.”

Jefferson previously said that the new enlisted marketplace will be utilized by staff sergeants through master sergeants.

Kyle Rempfer was an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.

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