Human Capital Management

The “people” business.

Human Capital Development

Featured Case Study

Education and Training Community of Interest

U.S. Marine Corps, Education and Training Command (Ed&T)

Challenge

A continuous pursuit of knowledge and professional development throughout the career of a Marine is central to the Marine Corps’ educational philosophy. This same philosophy has now extended to include all Civilian Marines and has manifested in the creation of the Education and Training Community of Interest (Ed&T COI), with the primary objective of providing similar levels of training and education opportunities to Civilian Marines as well as creating a culture of self-directed continuous development and improvement across the workforce. As such, the Ed&T COI seeks to provide Civilian Marines within the 1700 series-grouping with training and educational opportunities designed specifically for individual professional development to ensure the COI is prepared to respond efficiently to emerging Marine Corps training and education mission requirements.

Solution

The Bowen Group understood that providing avenues and structure to develop the civilian workforce is an integral part of the Marine Corps total force management concept. In partnership with the Ed&T COI, The Bowen Group leveraged deep knowledge of the Marine Corps and broad expertise in workforce development to create an integrated approach to workforce competency validation and community maturation.

Competency Development and Validation.

The Bowen Group worked in concert with Ed&T COI manager to assess existing competencies and then develop, refine and validate new competencies at each defined skill level aligned with the specific series in the community. To begin The Bowen Group conducted extensive research and job task analyses to build baseline competencies for each career series. Once complete, Bowen professionals worked with the Ed&T COI manager and select subject matter experts from each series to refine the draft competencies ensuring each competency addressed a specific work requirement with a defined and measureable outcome. Moving to the next step, The Bowen Group facilitated working groups of subject matter experts to validate and further refine the competencies, again ensuring each competency represented a real work requirement with a definable outcome. Finally, as the last step in the competency validation process, The Bowen Group fielded an electronic survey that was pushed to the entire community population. Using statistical measures for determining face and content validity, The Bowen Group was able to determine the validity of each competency at each skill level for each career series within the Community.



Community Strategic Planning.

The Bowen Group conducted a strategic planning conference for the Ed&T COI to develop a Community-specific strategic plan establishing real and actionable goals and objectives. The strategic plan incorporated specific workforce developmental goals including the creation of structures for a professional development continuum and program, internship program, rotational assignment program, coordinated and integrated internal communication plan for sharing information and best practices, and employee award program for all Civilian Marines within the Ed&T COI.



Result

The Education and Training Community of Interest now has a solid baseline of competencies through which to assess individual developmental needs against real work requirements and a detailed strategic plan with a long-term focus and associated short- and long-term goals. While resources are always an issue within DoD, the Ed&T COI manager is now able to articulate the real need for Civilian Marine learning and development related to competency gaps in the workforce.


Human Capital Management Case Studies

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