A Newsletter from PAF's WDH Program
Results You Can Use
March 2024
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Photo by Senior Airman River Bruce/U.S. Air Force
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From the Director
I am pleased to share the latest issue of Results You Can Use, a quarterly newsletter featuring research that enables the Department of the Air Force (DAF) to manage its most important asset: its workforce.
The DAF is actively reforming its workforce strategies to enhance operational effectiveness and meet the demands of the Great Power Competition. This reform includes introducing technical tracks and warrant officers to cultivate specialized expertise. In this newsletter, our columnists highlight some of our work addressing these challenges, including research that is already in the DAF's hands.
Findings from Officer Career Management: Additional Steps Toward Modernization and Supplemental Career Paths for Air Force Pilots can inform the implementation of this strategic shift toward developing technically proficient, specialized, and adaptively trained personnel to fill leadership and expertise gaps. However, the successful integration of these initiatives faces several challenges, including mitigating resistance to change, ensuring alignment with operational demands, and preserving the core values of the service. Addressing these challenges requires careful planning, open communication, and a commitment to adapting traditional structures to contemporary demands, ensuring the DAF remains agile and effective in a rapidly evolving strategic environment.
I look forward to your feedback: WDHNewsletter@rand.org
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Nelson Lim
Director, Workforce, Development, and Health (WDH) Program, RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF)
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What our columnists are reading this month
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WORKFORCE CLIMATE AND CULTURE
Miriam Matthews
Associate director of the Workforce, Development, and Health program
Long-term organizational change is needed to ready the DAF workforce for their roles in Great Power Competition. These changes include transforming parts of the DAF's current climate and addressing resistance to preparations for potential future competition. Recent RAND research, conducted for the U.S. Army, identified drivers of culture change and actions organizations can take to influence their culture. Among the critical drivers that the researchers identified are establishing and communicating goals, holding leaders accountable, providing continuous training, providing sufficient time and resources, and engaging leaders at all levels. Strategies from this report may help the DAF better institutionalize needed organizational change.
Read the Report
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TALENT MANAGEMENT
Sean Robson
Senior Behavioral and Policy Scientist
In a series of reports, RAND explores the transformative potential of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing to enhance the DAF's strategies for human resource management (HRM). Together, these reports offer a comprehensive roadmap for harnessing ML to meet the DAF's HRM needs, ensuring strategic advantage and operational efficiency in a rapidly evolving security landscape.
Read Volume 1
Read Volume 2
Read Volume 3
Read Volume 4
Read Volume 5
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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY WORKFORCE
Lisa Harrington
Senior Operations Researcher
The DAF is prioritizing STEM to drive new innovations across all domains and in the joint environment. Yet many STEM needs across USAF officer career fields are unmet, and only about half the officers assigned to positions that require master's degrees have the right degree and academic specialty. This happens because the assignment process does not prioritize matching officers with advanced degrees to positions where they are needed. Also, the USSF presents new demands for a workforce skilled in STEM disciplines. To field a robust technical workforce (officer, enlisted, civilian, and contractor) the DAF will need to systematically identify needed competencies and the most effective way to develop or hire personnel.
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CIVILIAN WORKFORCE
Kirsten M. Keller
Senior Behavioral Scientist
The civilian workforce is a critical source of technical talent in the DAF. Yet, like other DoD components, the DAF often struggles to attract and retain the technical talent it needs. A recent policy brief exploring the race for technical talent reported that DoD loses technical talent at a much higher rate than most sectors—indicating that "more than 75 percent of technical talent flows were outgoing for the DOD." Recent RAND research examining six occupation types, including computer science, operations research, and electronics engineering, provides additional insight into DAF-specific barriers for employing technical talent. Lower pay was among them. Both reports offer solutions that the DAF can use to increase technical talent in the civilian workforce.
Read the Policy Brief
Read the Report
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PERSONNEL READINESS
Maria Lytell
Senior Behavioral Scientist
To prepare airmen for Great Power Competition, DAF leaders plan to develop Mission Ready Airmen (MRA) who have a "mix of skills" to meet operational needs. As Air Force leadership moves forward, it should also look back at efforts to institutionalize a similar concept: the Multi-Capable Airmen (MCA). MCA are trained on expeditionary skills to perform in austere environments and are expected to perform tasks outside their core occupational specialties. The Forces We Need describes how the Air Force tried to establish the MCA concept, and points out areas to focus on to ensure institutionalization filters down to the operational and tactical levels.
Read the Report
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TRAINING AND EDUCATION
Mark Toukan
Political Scientist
As part of its efforts to reoptimize the force for Great Power Competition, the DAF must understand the capability of its forces for complex operations and overcome a mismatch between current readiness metrics and anticipated mission demands. A new RAND report identifies three main gaps in readiness assessment: measurement of factors involved in when forces are integrated, readiness reports that do not align with force presentation, and requirements to report on scenarios that units can't or rarely train against. The report emphasizes aligning training infrastructure development with assessment needs and highlights investments in operational training infrastructure—including future synthetic training environments—to improve data-driven readiness assessments.
Read the Report
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