NAVY TO AUCTION KEY ASSIGNMENTS

The Navy has embarked on a rev­o­lu­tion­ary move to staff its hardest-​​to-​​fill posi­tions: open them up to online auc­tion. The Wall Street Journal has the scoop (sub­scrip­tion required):

For decades, when the Navy needed to fill an unpop­u­lar job in a dis­tant place, it sim­ply ordered a sailor and his or her fam­ily to move.
Recently, it took a dif­fer­ent tack. To keep skilled sailors in the ser­vice — which entails keep­ing their fam­i­lies happy — Navy offi­cials put some of those out-​​of-​​favor jobs up for online auc­tion, a la eBay. Among the first to bite was Petty Officer 1st Class Elishaine Moses. He offered to take a job in Yokuska, Japan, but only if the Navy was will­ing to bump up his salary by $350 a month.
He doesn’t want to live in Japan. Nor does his wife. But they fig­ured an extra $350 a month would go a long way toward a down pay­ment on a house. “My No. 1 goal in life right now is to save enough money to build a house,” his wife, Shana Moses, says.
The online auc­tions are one piece of a new Navy plan to unleash the power of the free mar­ket on its per­son­nel sys­tem. Under the old sys­tem a Navy per­son­nel offi­cer, known as a “detailer,” filled all of the Navy’s jobs by search­ing through a data­base for a sailor whose rota­tion date and skills matched up most closely with an upcom­ing vacancy. “The old sys­tem was Stalin-​​like,” says Rear Adm. Jake Shuford, who is in charge of the redesign.
In the new sys­tem, sailors will be able to bid on jobs that no one wants. Ships with vacan­cies also will be able to bid for sailors that they really want. The Navy is even con­sid­er­ing allow­ing sailors who are par­tic­u­larly good at their jobs to apply for posi­tions that would tra­di­tion­ally go to higher-​​ranking offi­cers…
Navy offi­cials say they have no choice if they are going to per­suade skilled sailors and their fam­i­lies to stay in the ser­vice. Although sailors are re-​​enlisting at record rates, the ser­vice is still short on troops trained in crit­i­cal high-​​tech spe­cial­ties such as cryp­tog­ra­phy, infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy and med­i­cine. As the Navy replaces its cur­rent fleet with new ships, which rely heav­ily on automa­tion to reduce the num­ber of sailors on board, these tech­ni­cally adept sailors will be in even more demand.
“This isn’t about cre­at­ing a kinder, gen­tler Navy,” says Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark of the shift to a free-​​market sys­tem. “This is about focus­ing on per­for­mance more than ever before.”

(via JO Forum)

August 12th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.