The biggest challenge — and potential risk — for the Navy's new training program is that the fleet owns it and operational commanders will have a big say in what training sailors get and when.

Sure, the Naval Education and Training Command, which has overseen enlisted training for generations, will still be part of the picture. 

But as the transformation of the Navy's training pipeline starts to take effect this year, it will be the fleet commanders — both Atlantic and Pacific — who will decide when the sailor gets their next level of training.

"For the ship CO, he gets to decide when that sailor is ready for that advanced training," said Al Gonzalez, the top personnel and training official at Fleet Forces Command.  

"It may happen at year one plus one day, or [the CO] may say you need a little more time."

Starting this year, the Navy will be cutting up-front training in ‘A’ school by as much as 30 percent, and the oversight by NETC will end when sailors head to their first duty assignment.

Fleet commanders will oversee the bulk of a sailors' advanced training, that will now be broken up into "blocks" of training and spread intermittently across a sailor’s career after spending time on the job in the fleet.

It’ll be up to the fleet commanders to decide exactly what sailors will learn and when.

"Once [sailors]have been on the ship for about a year and they have proven their ability to absorb more knowledge in their particular career field … we will give the command an opportunity to get that sailor to block one, which is their next update on their career field."

The changes signal a historic break from the Navy's long-standing tradition of giving sailors lengthy initial training and teaching skills that sailors might not use for years — if ever.

"If we train them on something that they will not use for the next three, four, five years, they lose their skill-set in those areas," Gonzalez said.

"What we are doing is we are looking at all that accession training and figuring out what they need in the first two years that they are going to be on the platform," he said.

In the past, efforts to cut training invariably led to grumbling from the fleet and specifically the deck plates that newly minted junior sailors were arriving at their first duty assignment without the skills to do their jobs.

There is some anxiety about how the new regimen will work in practice. Some people in the Navy are wonder whether the shortened A-Schools will provide junior sailors with the skills they'll need at their first job.

And there’s also concern among some senior enlisted officials that commands won’t get their sailors to follow on training — and here, there’s some historical precedent.

Fleet commands have traditionally been stingy with sailor’s time, given all the operational commitments, inspections and maintenance required in the fleet today. And the result is, sometimes, that sailors have suffered at the hands of their commands.

For example, the Navy has long required sailors to attend leadership training as they advance to the next paygrade. A decade ago, that training was a week-long and was given at training commands. But in some cases, commanders did not prioritize that training and at one point 28,000 sailors who did not have that training were at risk of not being eligible promotion.

It took a year and a concentrated effort by personnel officials, including suspending the advancement requirement for the training for a year so the Navy could get more sailors into that training course and whittle down the number of impacted sailors to 10,000.

But the problem persisted and within months the training was reworked.

But Gonzalez says that this situation will be different from the get go.

"That was a very significant point when the fleet became the leader in this particular activity," Gonzalez. "As we looked at what we were doing to the operating forces, we did not want to put an undue burden on them, and that this effort provides tangible improvement for both the sailor and the ship."

With the fleet running the show, he said, it’s easier for leadership to set the expectations for commanders — as well as setting the rules for ensuring sailors get their follow-on training within set limits.

This gives the command the chance to gauge the sailor’s actual performance, Gonzalez says, and to work with him or her on where their skills are lacking — and they can find the right place in the ship’s schedule.

"They can remediate a few of the things that they need to so that when he goes back to the training he is all up to speed and he is not going to be behind when he enters that course."

Gonzalez says the rule have been set to help the sailor as well as the command.

"What we have done for the ships is a number of things, First we have given them a wide area on which to get the sailor back to the training," he said.

"Two, we give the CO of that ship a guarantee — and in fact it is not even a question — that sailor would be going back to the same unit that he came from when he gets done with the training.

And what the command gets is an improved sailor, ready to take the knowledge he gets from that course and apply it immediately to the ship that invested that time in sending him.

"So the ship has an investment and a reward coming out of getting that sailor ready for his next block — and then when he comes back they get the benefit of that sailor having a higher level of skillset to perform on the same ship that he left," Gonzalez said.

"The sailor benefits because he does not have to re-qualify on watch stations or warfare qualifications, does not have to move and comes back to the ship knowing that he can do a better job."

About Mark D. Faram

Mark D. Faram is a former reporter for Navy Times. He was a senior writer covering personnel, cultural and historical issues. A nine-year active duty Navy veteran, Faram served from 1978 to 1987 as a Navy Diver and photographer.

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