Military Training Issues at Individual, Team & Organisational Levels

The military mission and tasks that service personnel are required to perform have recently changed radically, with increasing emphasis on operations other than war, such as peacekeeping, which have different needs in terms of training. The MOD needs versatile, adaptable and rapidly deployable forces to meet these needs in the context of Network Enabled Capability. Training, including physical training, must enable personnel and units to be ready for all operations at short notice, taking advantage of capabilities offered by the equipment. Moreover, it must be provided cost-effectively, making full use of emergent training technologies and techniques.

The Haldane-Spearman Consortium members have extensive experience of conducting Training Needs Analysis compliant with JSP 502 on a wide range of military systems. Work has been undertaken on the individual, team and collective training requirement under a range of MOD programmes.

Our TNA work has explored the utility of a range of innovative methods and media:

- E-learning. Issues relating to the role of e-learning as a means of enabling non-residential training must be considered. These include how guidance and mentoring from instructors, motivational support from other students, and appropriate remedial training can be provided.

- Skill fade. Given the length of some operations, military skill fade must be avoided by means of sustainment training. It is also important to establish and understand propensity of skill fade to determine requirements for this training.

- Cost-effective training. Innovative training approaches that are considered must be assessed for cost-effectiveness. Issues include the required level of fidelity, how instructional value might be enhanced through appropriately designed courseware and performance appraisal systems, and the precise role that simulation should play alongside other training media.

- Adaptive training. Training must take account of individual students' learning rates and styles so involuntary wastage is reduced during training courses. Mechanisms for achieving this must be understood, and in particular how student performance can be sampled during training and used to plan future course content.

- Embedded training. Training at short notice might be realised by embedding training capabilities within operational systems. A method by which tasks might be prioritised for embedding and the aspects of tasks that should be included need to be determined.

- Education. Service personnel's expectation of the continuing education provided by the Armed Forces needs to be understood so that if necessary it can be improved.

Within a Systems Approach to Training, we have previously evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of training, including transfer of training studies and cost benefit analyses. This has included evaluations of distance learning techniques.