This project is a part of the larger collaboration between the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and the Social and Decision Analytics at University of Virginia. In previous summer projects students have worked on modeling Army career pathways. Last summer students worked with ARI to provide insight into retention in the Army, one of the factors of manpower planning.

Manpower planning is an essential process for all employers to get employees with the right skills and background at the right place at the right time. In an organization like the U.S. Army, which employs individuals with a variety of skills and backgrounds all over the world, manpower planning is especially important (Abdessameud, 2018; Driscoll et al, 2007; Durso and Donahue, 1995; Krupa, 2018; Gass et al., 1988; Hall, 2009; Nayar et al., 2021; Van Kerckhouven and Guerry, 2018; West, 2017; Wang, 2005).

From the perspective of an individual, it is important to match the manpower needs of an employer in order to be hired (Huang et al, 2019). A measure of this is person-job fit. This is often measured through survey data of employees and impacts how they feel about their job and how proficient they are at that job (Huang et al, 2019). Often this survey data is unobtainable or hard to acquire, therefore we need an understanding of the skills and individual may have and of the job they are required to do. In a different way, veterans are often crowded out in job searches because they donโ€™t know what skills they have acquired in their tenure. Often employers are unsure of how the addition of a military member because of their predisposed attitudes about the military, attitudes about PTSD and other discussed impacts of joining the military, the perception of skills that translate from the military into civilian jobs (Stone and Stone, 2015). Our goal for the summer was to provide insight into skills that are translated from the Army into civilian life to decrease this negative perception and increase likelihood of hiring.

We study the connection of Army jobs and skills acquired through civilian jobs to create a unique vector of skills associated with the Army.

We utilize a unique O*NET crosswalk that connects Army Military Occupation Specialty (MOS) codes with Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes to data from a proprietary data-set. This proprietary data-set gives us skills required for jobs through job advertisements. This research provides an overview of skills acquired in the Army which can provide information to Army Veterans on the jobs they may be best suited for and the skills they can place on their resumes in general and specifically in the healthcare industry.