Abstract:

Situation:
The German Armed Forces (AF) face a massive reform resulting in a massive headcount reduction. This puts huge pressure on the Army’s Technical School to change its training approach: training one soldier to maintain only one system (vehicle/ weapon). Instead Mechanics will have to be able to maintain multiple systems. It was imperative to optimize the school’s course curriculum to enable efficient, sufficient and timely training of mechanics to build the newly required multiple skill sets.

Complication:
This is highly challenging: 1) soldiers can’t spend unlimited time in training measures, 2) acquired skills need to be continuously refreshed. Solving these issues required “squaring the circle”: training and maintaining more skills in the same - or even less - time. To master this challenge the training strategy, curriculum logic and course design have been completely reinvented and innovated.

Solution:
The solution builds on several thoroughly IT-facilitated components: 1) a demand model, implying a paradigm shift to focusing on mission demand, 2) a competency model, implying a paradigm shift to focusing on skills rather than positions. 3) a synergy model.

Ad 1) the demand model allows to derive training demand from defined mission scenarios through an integrated synchronizing model for the first time. Thus it’s possible to derive course, trainer and material demands directly from mission scenarios and related system and personnel demand.
Ad 2) a competency model provides the common definitional structure for the integration of the overall skills required for missions, needed positions types and individual skill portfolios for each post.
Ad 3) The synergy model itself utilizes an data based, analytical approach building on similarities of system-components and related maintenance skills in order to identify and eliminate redundancies in the various course curriculums

This solution allows the automated generation of training modules by consolidating information about competencies, necessary training time per competency and technical similarities of the system components. It also allows the automated generation of the curriculum for the courses needed to train for the various job roles by defining the systems a soldier has to maintain.

Training duration needed for multi skilling could be reduced by an average of 30%.

Novelties:
Comprehensive and versatile methodology for training strategy and curriculum design, which has not existed before.

Novelty due to:
-Structured process, complete toolset and thorough, data-based, modeling.
- Holistic demand model allowing consistent integration synchronization of quantitative maintenance demands with training offerings.
- Applicable competency model as central component allowing systematic integration of all influencing factors.
- Consistent IT-toolset utilizing quantitative models and advanced statistics to provide actionable results.
- Systematic and reliable identification of training synergies by integrating distributed expert knowledge and deriving training commonalities based on technical similarities.
- Automated course generation using role based skill requirements.

Keywords:

Curriculum Optimization, Analytics, Maintenance Workforce, Competency Management, Demand Modeling, Redundancy Elimination, Synergy Leveraging, Course Generation