Research Summaries

Back Design of an Enlisted Assignment & Retention Marketplace

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Gates, William R.
Doerr, Kenneth
Hatch, William D.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary The Navy’s current enlisted assignment & career management system is a combination of voluntary & involuntary elements. While retention is a voluntary decision, the options available to Sailors are generally few & the reenlistment process is currently decoupled from the assignment process. The assignment process often involves involuntary actions by the Sailor, as the Navy attempts to match a diversity of jobs of differing difficulty & attractiveness to Sailors with a variety of preferences, backgrounds & skills. To meet the Navy’s needs, the current assignment matching process must be strongly directed by Navy detailers with few elements of a “marketplace” in which flexibility, negotiation, & voluntary choice are evident. If Navy were to more strictly adhere to Sailor preferences under the current system, many important Navy jobs would go unfilled and the matching of Sailor experience/skills with jobs would not produce the career paths or job productivity required. Navy needs a market process which is capable of meeting Navy’s job & career needs while also meeting the desires, preferences, & aspirations of individual Sailors.
NPS has conducted extensive past research on the enlisted assignment process with in the Navy and across the other services. In addition, NPS has examined private sector market-based assignment processes (nurses/fire fighters to shifts, pilots to routes, faculty members to offices, etc.). We have also examined several alternative assignment processes, including two-sided matching, optimization, and the Navy's current auction-based Assignment Incentive Pay (AIP) program.
This research will update that work as appropriate, and develop market-based assignment courses of action. Simulation modeling will compare the performance of the alternative proposals.
Keywords
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal