When Army 2nd Lieutenant Joseph Riley was a senior at the University of Virginia, he ranked 10th out of 5,579 in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) National Order of Merit List. Upon graduation, he was proudly commissioned an Army officer and selected as a Rhodes Scholar to study at Oxford, where he pursued a master’s degree in international relations.
What I Learned from Transforming the U.S. Military’s Approach to Talent
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.