In the military, you don’t get to pick your unit. Your service member can put in their preferences. They can agonize over their wish list, but that is the extent of influence they have over their next job.
Our service members almost never interview. They never put together a resume or a cover letter. The Commanding Officer or Sergeant Major doesn’t do any hiring.
The Department of Defense is one of the largest employers in the country with more than two million full and part time workers, but we don’t treat that as a labor market. We treat it as a logistics problem.
Jobs are centralized so that the Monitor or the HRC or the Detailer assigns available, qualified people to available jobs. Bam! Done and DONE!!
This may be the way it has always been done, but it has been suggested that this assignment process doesn’t let military members express their career aspirations. It doesn’t let people specialize in what they are good at. It doesn’t let anyone seek a better boss. And, perhaps most importantly these days, it doesn’t give service members any of the job seeking skills they will need in the outside world.
So what do you think?
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USMC photo by Cpl. Charlie Clark
