The Information Systems Technician (IT) and the Cryptologic Technician-Communications (CTO) basically performed the same job, the main difference being that CTOs were responsible for communicating special compartmented intelligence information over radio circuits.

As a result, the Bureau of Personnel recommended the CTO community be merged into the IT rating. The paperwork is on the desk of the chief of naval operations (CNO) for final approval, said Cmdr. William Kramer, the process action officer for the Navy's Enlisted Community Manager. He expects a merger date of January 2006 will be approved.

The IT rating, formerly known as Radioman, is itself the product of a merger in 1997 of Radiomen with Data Processing Technicians, brought about by changing technology that blended digital computers with radio communications.

Rating changes are business as usual for the Navy as required job skills change with requirements and technology. For example, the Navy long ago cast off ratings such as blacksmith and bugler. The number of Navy ships powered by steam boilers has declined so much that the Boiler Technician rating was retired during the 1990s. But mergers seem almost counterintuitive with the ever-expanding complexity and specialization of new technologies that enter the pipeline.

The pace of mergers, however, is accelerating as the Navy implements its Human Capital Strategy, a plan to reshape the way the service mans its fleet and shore establishments by reducing the size of the work force and achieving efficiencies and streamlining training, thereby improving effectiveness at lower cost. Adm. Michael G. Mullen, in his CNO Guidance for 2006, calls for the Navy to “deliver a transformed, competency-based manpower and personnel system” for all segments of its work force. Rating mergers are one force-shaping tool being used to transform the Navy's work force to meet the needs of the 21st century.

Under Vice Adm. Gerald Hoewing, chief of naval personnel, the Navy has been taking a “very granular view” of the work its sailors were doing, finding that sailors in different ratings were “doing similar or, in many cases, exactly the same work.

“We wanted to capture the opportunity to eliminate the duplication in training and in work, and merge [ratings] together to where it does good for the Navy because it makes us more efficient and effective in the delivery of our product,” he said. “It's [also] good for the sailors because they have broader job opportunities, more choice, more opportunities to grow and develop.”

As an example, Hoewing pointed to the recently approved merger of the Dental Technician (DT) rating into the Hospital Corpsman (HM) rating. “A dental technician who would only have had DT sorts of jobs will now have a much broader opportunity in different areas and different types of work in order to be able to give them that additional choice and additional opportunity. They'll be able to compete and apply for what were formerly HM jobs also.”

“We've found that a Dental Tech rating has a 70-percent commonality with the Hospital Corpsman rating, so the majority of functions were redundant with what corpsmen did,” said Cmdr. Ken Laube, medical enlisted community manager for the Navy.

One junior dental technician interviewed by Seapower expressed anxiety over having to take the hospital corpsman advancement exam.

Hoewing responded by describing changes in the focus of the rating's advancement exam.

“In years past, our advancement examinations were more administratively focused,” he said. “Today, because we have analyzed the work that the sailor is expected to accomplish in those jobs, we've been able to determine what knowledge and abilities those sailors need. So, he will not have to study for the administrative trivia behind the HM rate, he will literally be able to focus on the tasks and the level of knowledge that he should [have] to be able to perform. And that should narrow down and improve his opportunity to prepare for that exam.”

Hoewing also addressed the concern that merging rates requires people to be generalists required to master more than they can handle: “You could go too far and that's why we put science into this process; literally taking a look at the work out there and analyzing the tasks. We partnered with industry, we used the same standards as the Department of Labor.”

More generalists or “hybrid sailors” will be needed as the service staffs its future ships, he said. For example, the Littoral Combat Ship will have a basic crew of 40 to 45 sailors.

“We have to make them hybrid sailors [with] broader knowledge, broader understanding because the content of the jobs are going to be broader,” Hoewing said. “One of the key [positive] feedbacks we get toward rating mergers is that by increasing the scope and the content of the job, that makes the job more challenging and our sailors like that.”

Senior Chief Craig Burns, the Navy's enlisted community manager for operations and surface combat systems ratings, described an example of the hybrid sailor. “The Interior Communications Electrician who is the LAN (local-area network) tech is also going to be the LAN administrator for the whole ship, which is normally an IT job. It's something that has always been a skill set of one rate; now he's picking a skill set from another rate.”

Like change anywhere, rating mergers are generators of anxiety among the affected personnel that dissipates over time. The Navy is now three years into a merger of the Aviation Storekeepers (AKs) -- supply clerks -- into the Storekeeper (SK) rating.

“We now no longer really talk about AKs at all,” said Cmdr. Beth Howell, the Navy's supply enlisted community manager. “They're completely merged.”

One merger approved earlier this year is that of the Personnelman and the Disbursing Clerk into the Personnel Specialist rating, made possible by advances in shipboard pay and recordkeeping practices.

Commonality is a driving consideration for merging the Gunner's Mate and Torpedoman ratings. “If ever there was a skill set that matched almost perfectly, it is those two rates,” said Burns. “When they did a commonality study between those two they were almost identical.”

The advent of new helicopters such as the MH-60 is behind the service's decision to merge all helicopter crewmen -- some of whom are mechanics from a variety of ratings, with additional aircrew qualification -- into the Aviation Warfare Systems Operator rating, said Cmdr. Joel Schuster, the Air Crew enlisted community manager.

The Navy also is looking for efficiencies in its proposal to shape the engineers that operate and repair machinery in surface ships, combining eight ratings into three, a move already completed in the submarine community

Mergers are not the only trend in ratings. The Navy is in the process of creating four new ratings out of what currently are special qualifications in high demand in the global war on terrorism. New ratings for Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Diver were approved in October.

“We're still in the decisional phase of the SEAL and SWCC (Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewman),” said Cmdr. Dave Thorleitson, the enlisted community manager for those specialties.

Currently, sailors in those four communities are all source-rated. “We send these guys to ‘A' (basic job skill) schools, and they never end up working in that rating again,” he said. Therefore, a sailor who is an HT (Hull Maintenance Technician) and a SEAL, “gets advanced in the HT world, yet he does all his work in the SEAL world.”

A SEAL rating would allow sailors to focus on rating-specific information. Sailors in training will study SEAL rating information rather than HT source-rating information. This would enable prospective SEALs to bypass other ‘A' schools and go straight into the SEAL training pipeline, Thorleitson said.

The direction of the Navy today is to align like skill sets with as few ratings as possible, Kramer said. Therefore, each individual is eligible for a wider array of job opportunities.

Hoewing predicts ratings mergers will bring about the demise of the Navy Enlisted Classification (NEC) system, an exhaustive series of job subspecialties.

“The majority of those NECs has some training associated with them, so there's an overhead cost in each one of those,” he said. “By driving toward the competency bases [that are part of the Human Capital Strategy], we should be able to drive some of those overhead costs out and it will simplify our management profile dramatically rather than having 1,000 stovepipes that you have to manage.”