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Client: Canadian Army Digitization Office Kingston

Case Study: Training Needs Analysis and Recommendations for Army Digitization

Client Profile

The Army Digitization Office Kingston (ADOK) - a unit of the Army's Land Force Doctrine and Training System - is led by a senior Army officer and has approximately 30 civilian employees who work as doctrine developers, computer programmers, systems administrators, and user trainers. The mission of ADOK is to facilitate the fielding and integration of advanced digital command and control systems and networks within the Canadian Army by assisting or leading in the development and dissemination of doctrine and training in the tactical employment of these capabilities.

Business Challenge

Although the Canadian Forces have been using digital command and control systems for land operations in Afghanistan since 2005, this was only in a limited capacity. Consequently, in 2006 a strategic decision was made to field a completely digitized task force for operations in Afghanistan during 2007. In order to implement this wide-ranging vision, the Army had to take steps to institutionalize digitization in its training programmes. This would entail a complete review of the Army's technical, tactical and leadership courses as well as its approach to exercises. Amongst other things, the Army needed to consider how each course is conducted to determine if it must be "digitized", how it can be digitized, and when. To give an idea of the scale of effort, there are approximately 20 military occupations either directly or indirectly afftected by this initiative and total training throughput in any given year on Army-run courses is approximately 300,000 student-days. In addition, the task force itself has over 2,000 soldiers, NCOs and officers, all of whom need some level of skills to operate in a digitized environment.

Solution

The Director of ADOK retained the services of Richard Martin of Alcera Consulting Inc. in order to conduct a training needs analysis to support institutionalization of digitization in the Army's training systems. This project was conducted between September 2006 and March 2007. Richard Martin collected data on each of the digital command and control systems, the task force organization and the existing training baseline of each affected occupation, for all ranks. He then analyzed the digital job requirements in terms of information management and systems management for each individual position and organization in the task force (over 2,000 people). He visited Army field units which had operational experience in using the digital systems and consulted widely with training and doctrine experts within the Army. Richard also led two working groups involving approximately 20 subject matter experts each to analyze and improve upon the strawman training concepts he had developed over the previous months. This led to consensus-building on training requirements, priorities for developmental work, and an outline implementation plan for both system operators and technicians.

Richard Martin presented a detailed report which contained specific recommendations on "digitizing" the Army's training system. It also contained an implementation plan to guide the development of new courses and the modification of existing courses for each of the approximately 20 affected occupations. Of particular note, as a result of the analysis, he made recommendations on resolving a longstanding issue with respect to attribution of operational responsibilities between the Signals technician and Signals operator occupations.

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