Ensuring force-wide training and readiness requires comprehensive data describing job requirements, training histories, and proficiencies. Although the U.S. military has created numerous systems that seek to collect and maintain human performance data, a significant gap remains in the lack of shared digital expressions of readiness across the ecosystem. In this paper we discuss and illustrate the benefits of implementing centralized competency framework definitions that can be leveraged for actionable insights across the full training and readiness lifecycle. Our approach, developed and demonstrated over numerous recent Navy, Army, and Air Force projects, supports a transition to competency-based analysis and tracking through a process we term “digitization”. We describe how our semi-automated digitization techniques capture all available data that defines what personnel should know and do within a military organization. Such data can include: (1) who a person is and their training background; (2) the job duties associated with a person’s role and assignments; (3) what a person has demonstrated they know and can do; (4) what credentials a person has earned; and (5) what a person's capabilities and goals are according to their organization. We discuss active military use cases to illustrate how digitization involves transforming legacy artifacts that describe human experience, capability, potential, expectations, and insights into machine actionable URI-referenceable data, typically Linked Data. Linked Data can be threaded between URL identified data (skills, competencies, etc.) and training systems. Expressing occupations and related information as Linked Data allows systems to perform rapid analysis by uniformly following data trails across system, organizational, and authoritative boundaries.
We conclude with a discussion of how our digitization approach generalizes to provide organizations a foundation focused on the human element of training and readiness, enabling a data-driven accelerator for sustaining a global force in a digital world.
Keywords
COMPETENCY BASED TRAINING, FRAMEWORK, LEARNING ANALYTICS
Additional Keywords
Digitization, Linked Data