Training and education in the armed forces

Background

There has been a consistent trend over the past two decades to reduce the overall complement in all sectors of the British Armed Forces.  During the same period there has also been a trend toward the rapid deployment of combat and peacekeeping forces and the provision of humanitarian aid.  Both these trends have also been complemented by an increase in the complexity of the equipment used by personnel and in the nature of operations.  These broad trends pose several key challenges for the current and future deployment of UK armed forces.

• The theatre of operation into which armed forces will be deployed is now more uncertain.  Personnel need to be equipped and trained to deal with an increased variety of threats and roles in a wider variety of environments.
  
• More complex equipment (much of which must also now perform a variety of roles) requires greater, in-depth training to exploit its capability.
  
• With smaller armed forces, increased flexibility is required to operate within the parameters described above to maintain current levels of operational effectiveness.  Greater co-operation with the armed forces from other countries is also required.

Within the above parameters it becomes apparent that contradictory drivers need to be resolved.  Training requirements simultaneously become far more demanding and less easy to specify as a result of the increasingly uncertain nature of future operations and equipment complexity.  Furthermore, with a shrinking complement in the UK armed forces it is also highly likely that operational utilisation will increase further reducing opportunities for training. 

Several further parameters also need to be incorporated into future manning scenarios.  Career progression and personnel retention is becoming a major issue.  Highly trained, technically competent personnel need to be retained to ensure operational effectiveness.  Changes in the national curriculum (government educational policy) will also result in changes in recruitment and selection policies and the skills, knowledge and abilities of new entry cadets to the services.  It is therefore likely that the educational and skills profile of personnel serving in the technical branches of the British armed forces will change slowly but significantly over the next two decades as a result of changes to in-service education and training.  These shifts in education and demographic factors need to be anticipated so they may be incorporated into the design of, and training for future equipment and operations. 

Aims

To attempt to resolve the contradictory drivers of increased equipment complexity, increasing uncertainty in deployment and decreasing force complement, a multi-layered research programme is proposed.  This will encompass an educational requirements analysis for current and future military personnel and the development of tools for hierarchical and cognitive task analyses for the rapid generation of training needs analyses (for further information on the HTA and CWA tools click the following link HFI tools, testbeds and trials). 

These tools will be capable of being applied during the early stages of the Concept, Assessment, Design, Manufacture, In-Service and Disposal (CADMID) cycle to ensure that Human Factors aspects are identified as soon as possible.  The output from the tool will also be applied later in the cycle to assist in the development of a training programme ensuring that all equipment currently being procured or planned for procurement is brought into service in a manner that is fully integrated across and within all services and divisions within such services.

Research

To achieve the aims above the following research will be conducted:

Analyse Future Requirements

Education Requirements Analysis

To establish if both economies of scale and improved final quality of training can be established across the armed forces by providing key fundamental areas of underlying knowledge (education) in a centralised facility prior to undertaking specific aspects of technical training.  Curricula will be re-analysed to assess if either subsequent application-specific training time can be reduced and/or training quality improved by only having to concentrate on targeted training for the application area and not having to inculcate underlying knowledge.  Any increase in the flexibility of employment of personnel as a result of a broader educational base will be established.

The research will also assess if the future knowledge requirements of forces personnel serving in the technical disciplines will be better achieved by changes in the selection process/criteria or by providing enhanced education and training while serving.

Research will also be conducted to establish current (and potentially future) knowledge levels of recruits to the technical branches of the armed forces for use in training and equipment design.

• Detailed information on research, downloadable reports
• Questions on this area of research can be addressed to Dr John Huddlestone