After last week’s release of the Active Duty and Reserve O-6 selection messages, I decided to perform some data visualization and analysis.
When examining the below graph it becomes abundantly clear that it’s increasingly more difficult to make Captain as an Active Duty Information Dominance Corps (IDC) Officer (with the exception of the Oceanography field, which has remained relatively steady).
[Of note, when calculating Overall Selection % I use the entire pool of Above Zone and In Zone officers as the denominator (unlike the Navy which only uses the In Zone, which I believe gives a misleadingly high number).]
When looking at the raw numbers it becomes even more shocking. In FY11 the predecessors to the IDC community selected 48 officers for promotion to O-6. After completion of the IDC integration, in FY12 33 were selected, and this number dropped even further to 24 in FY13. In two years the total number of O-6 promotions in our community have dropped by 50%.
As a Reserve Intel IDC Officer, I am quite surprised by the low but consistent % of promotions to O-6. It appears the IDC community is not doing as well as planned, when it comes to clearing out Above Zone Reserve Intel O-5’s. Over the past 3 years the Above Zone numbers have only dropped from 121, to 108, to 107. To help put those numbers in perspective, on the Active Duty Intel side over that same three-year period, the Above Zone numbers were 24, 33, and 37 respectively.
I am also intrigued by the points where the lines crossed for Information Professional (IP) and Oceanography officers, and the Reserve component now has higher promotion % numbers than their Active Duty counterparts. What will this mean for both of these communities, and is it a trend that will continue, or merely a statistical aberration?
As with any statistical analysis with a small sample, these numbers must be taken with a grain of salt. However, I believe this chart has exposed some areas that we in the community must continue to monitor and possibly reform.
If any of this has inspired you to do your own data mining and analysis, I've made my spreadsheet with original data, as well as graphs of In Zone and Above Zone promotions available here for download: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6861016/IDC%20Promotions.xlsx
LCDR Ian R. Colle
References:
FY 13 Reserve O-6 Message http://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/reference/messages/Documents/ALNAVS/ALN2012/ALN12029.txt
FY 13 Active Duty O-6 Message
FY 11 Reserve O-6 Promotion Stats
FY 12 Reserve O-6 Promotion Stats
http://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/boards/reserveofficer/06line/Documents/FY12%20RO6L%20STATS.pdf
FY 13 Reserve O-6 Promotion Stats
http://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/boards/reserveofficer/06line/Documents/FY13%20RO6L%20STATS.pdf
FY 11 Active Duty O-6 Stats
FY 12 Active O-6 Promotion Stats
FY 13 Active O-6 Promotion Stats
Ian,
ReplyDeleteAs my former boss was fond of telling me when I was a JO, "As long as the selection board is selecting one guy from my zone, I figure I have a pretty good shot." He never made Captain.
I figure, if you've done the hard jobs and have done a good job of taking care of your Sailors - the selection board can do the rest.
Looking at data in isolation is dangerous at best. Recommend that anyone truly interested in understanding WHY this is happening contact their OCM. A great place to start is LCDR Andy Newsome (902-874-3123), who is the IW OCM right now. I do concur that we need to do better to encourage the right CAPTs and CDRs both active and reserve to call it a day. We decided against the SERB and that's fine, but we should have those difficult conversations with those most deserving. If not JO retention will take a hit as soon as the economy shows signs of recovering and five years later we'll have a completely different challenge...promoting enough worthy candidates.
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