What I Learned From Transforming The U.S. Military’s Approach To Talent

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Doreen Collicott

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Jan 25, 2024, 12:02:17 PM1/25/24

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One approach to organize work without jobs is to fractionalize the work: breaking it down into more meaningful chunks of work in the form of projects or tasks that continuously evolve as business needs change, letting workers with a relevant portfolio of skills and capabilities flow to the work. This approach is gaining ground, and is advocated by leading thinkers such as Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau in their recent book Work without Jobs.8 Many organizations are experimenting with partial fractionalization in the form of internal talent marketplaces: letting workers carve out a portion of their time from their traditional job to take on projects and tasks anywhere in the organization based on their skills and interests, with opportunities suggested to them through AI-powered matching technology. At Haier, the entire organization of more than 75,000 employees works in a fully fractionalized work model, with an internal talent market that governs how talent is deployed on specific projects, structured into self-organizing, fluid microenterprises, each with 10 to 15 employees.9

What I Learned from Transforming the U.S. Militarys Approach to Talent

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Moving from jobs to skills as the organizing principle of work and the workforce will require a shared approach across the organization regarding the value and prioritization of skills as the connecting thread of talent management, and how they will inform all workforce decisions. As one Dutch communications company embarked on its transformational journey to become a skills-based organization, for example, it first defined its skills-based talent philosophy.22

The traditions and rules that strengthened the U.S. military over the last 250 years can, at times, make recruitment and retention difficult. In the last two years of the Obama administration, leaders at the Department of Defense set out to change how the department thought about and treated talent through the full career-cycle of uniformed and civilian personnel, from their recruitment through their training, advancement, retention, and retirement. The pool of available talent from which the department can attract and recruit young Americans is shrinking quickly, so they overhauled many of their talent practices to better compete against the private sector. Improvements included offering shorter ROTC scholarships, speeding up the job-offer process for civilian candidates, making requirements for promotion far more flexible, allowing women to serve in combat positions, and expanding the support the military offers to parents.

Developing flexible career pathways is essential to delivering this value proposition to candidates. Forward-thinking federal leaders have already found success with digital talent models with tailored, flexible career pathways. The United States Digital Service (USDS), founded during the Obama administration as part of the lessons learned from the launch of healthcare.gov, is predicated on bringing tech talent into government for two- to four-year tours. This value proposition works both ways. The federal government receives comparatively short, high-speed bursts of professional energy from designers, developers, and other top tech talent indexed against its toughest problems. In exchange, individuals in the service receive cross-agency exposure to high-priority public-service problems without committing their entire careers to federal service. The USDS provides an opportunity to have a tangible impact on mission before working in or returning to the private sector.

Here are a few key learnings from Robbins (his views, not the DoD) on how the military is amping up its hiring programs. This includes a critical project called GigEagle, a new Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) project that leverages top talent from the Reserve and National Guard on demand.

Prior to his appointment as CTMO, he was the Head of Non-Traditional Talent at Walmart where he developed strategy using innovative sourcing and production approaches to upskill and reskill talent. Mr. Parmeter also worked in other senior-level roles for Walmart to include Senior Director for STEM Programs and Senior Director for Military Programs where his talent strategies resulted in the hiring of about 80,000 Service members and military spouses per year.

The training camp was the forge in which civilians began to become military men and women. In the training camps new servicemen and women underwent rigorous physical conditioning. They were drilled in the basic elements of military life and trained to work as part of a team. They learned to operate and maintain weapons. They took tests to determine their talents and were taught more specialized skills. Paratroopers, antiaircraft teams, desert troops, and other unique units received additional instruction at special training centers.

Reconnecting Youth and Community: A Youth Development Approach (PDF; 59 pages)
This resource focuses on how communities can shift from a problem-focused approach to serving youth to a community-youth involvement model that captures the talents, abilities, and worth of youth.

At the Red Cross, innovation sits at the intersection of our mission and our constituents - the people we serve. Across the many programs we provide from disaster preparedness and response, to blood services, training services, support of the military, and more, the Red Cross Innovation Team experiments and develops new approaches that help deliver on our mission to prevent and alleviate human suffering in the face of emergencies.