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NEC-based detailing starts next year

The way all sailors are assigned to ships and squadrons is set to undergo a massive overhaul. As early as next year, your next job assignment will be based on the special skills you hold — not on your rating and paygrade.

The plan, officials say, is a critical step in reworking the Navy’s enlisted rating structure. And until the new detailing structure is in place, most planned rating mergers have been put on hold.

That’s because, officials say, in a smaller, post-merger Navy with broad ratings or career fields, detailing a sailor based only on a vague rating and paygrade won’t work and could cause problems in the fleet if underqualified sailors show up on the quarterdeck.

The key, they say, is assigning sailors based on their Navy enlisted classification. For the individual sailor, that means the possibility of serving in billets that you thought were closed, and paying more attention to NECs you hold in order to keep your job or move to one you want.

On the personnel side, manpower officials are trying to make sure they’re sending the right people to the right jobs.

“As we merge these ratings, we are trying to create a larger gene pool, but you cannot ignore the specialty skills they must have,” said Rear Adm. Don Quinn, commander of Navy Personnel Command. “So if you merge ratings, you need to have NECs or some kind of competency code to track the special skill sets.”

For example, he said, if the merger of all the surface engineering ratings was approved, all machinist’s mates, enginemen and gas turbine specialists (mechanical) would end up in the same broad rating.

More opportunities

Merging those ratings is good for sailors, as it increases learning and advancement opportunities while building more flexibility into the assignment system. It allows, say, former machinist’s mates to move out of the steam world, learn more about diesels or gas turbines and take a billet on a ship previously not open to them.

There is no official target date for putting the new detailing system online. But it will start with roughly 20 yet-to-be-named NECs in early 2010, said Capt. Tom Adams, who handles the program for Quinn at NPC.

But this isn’t a “pilot” program, officials say. It’s a gradual plan to bring all of the Navy’s 1,000-plus NECs into the system. No word yet on how long that could take; however, officials say the goal “is sooner than later.”

“We are in the early stages of working this idea,” Adams said. “Yes, there are obstacles in the way, such as old databases and computer technology, but we are working through those, and we’ve already made a lot of progress.”

For example, Adams said, the current personnel databases identify only two of a sailor’s NECs — a primary and a secondary. The average sailor has at least three — some as many as 10 — so gaps must be filled in.

Other NECs can be hidden for other reasons. Most require schooling, with the NEC awarded once that sailor graduates. But 112 NECs can be awarded for on-the-job training, and Adams said not all commands are as diligent as needed to ensure sailors are awarded the codes.

Identifying needs

On the other end of the assignment process, NPC is reaching out to all the major warfare communities to identify which NECs those communities need.

Quinn said that defining the manning levels for each NEC is the critical part of the picture, and it’s expected to vary, based on the size of the command and its mission.

For example, he said, you would need a higher percentage of exact-fit sailors to man a small ship such as a littoral combat ship — or an optimally manned destroyer — than you would need in a large-deck amphibious ship.

“What it comes down to is what level of manning are you able to afford,” Quinn said. “I think when we dig down into some of these NECs, we’re going to find some gaps.”

And in the end, those gaps are going to have to be filled — or the decision will have to be made to live with a lower NEC manning level.

“They’ll tell us what levels they want, and it will be up to us to tell them if the existing inventory of sailors with those skills can support that,” Quinn said. “If it can’t, then we’ll have to tell them what the cost will be to train more sailors into those skills to match — and they’ll have to decide to either train more sailors or live with lesser manning.”

Right now, the focus is on using existing codes, such as NECs. But Quinn said they eventually hope to capture all of a sailor’s skills by adding other codes into the system. For example, a sailor could be given the same “occupational codes” defined by the Labor Department.

“Every sailor is unique, and their total experience is what they bring to the table,” Quinn said. “I view this as trying to fit 332,000 unique snowflakes into 332,000 very specialized billets, so the more we know about both the sailor and the work required, the better we will do that.”