Part 1: Are We Asking the Right Workforce Questions?

The Security Cooperation Workforce as a Case Study

Workforce conversations across the Department of the Army often circle around the same HR language. We talk about recruiting, retention, competencies, training, succession planning, and hiring timelines. Sometimes the terminology changes depending on the audience, but the themes remain remarkably consistent. These are important conversations. They should be. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether we’ve adequately tested our assumptions about the workforce problem before we begin discussing solutions.

What Are We Actually Managing?

The Department of the Army has developed an extensive framework for managing its civilian workforce. Occupational series, career programs, position descriptions, certification requirements, training pathways, and workforce analytics all play important roles in organizing a large and complex enterprise. Each serves a distinct purpose, and together they create a common language for managing the workforce.

The existence of these systems raises a simple question. What do they actually describe?

They describe positions, organizational structure, qualification requirements, workforce processes, and developmental pathways. They tell us what the enterprise requires and how it organizes work. Those are all important functions. Whether they also describe workforce capability is a different question entirely.

Testing an Assumption

Recently, I had the opportunity to examine data associated with the Security Cooperation Workforce Human Capital Initiative (HCI). The initiative surfaced themes that felt immediately familiar: recruiting, retention, competencies, and training. None of those themes struck me as uniquely Security Cooperation. If anything, they echoed workforce conversations taking place throughout the Department of the Army. The question then became whether the available workforce data could help test the assumptions underlying those broader conversations.

Following the Evidence

Initial analysis of the data appeared consistent with familiar workforce narratives. As the demographic patterns emerged, however, the picture became more nuanced. The workforce appeared experienced, with multiple pathways through which expertise develops over time. Rather than resembling a straightforward recruiting or retention challenge, the workforce looked more like an established profession drawing on diverse sources of experience.

The HCI offered valuable insight into how members of the workforce experienced its challenges. The demographic analysis offered insight into the workforce’s composition and experience. Together, those perspectives provided a more complete understanding of the workforce and refined the questions worth asking.

What Are We Actually Measuring?

The questions raised by the demographic analysis ultimately led to another distinction. The new Security Cooperation coding framework represents a significant step forward in how the profession defines and organizes its positions. It clearly describes functional responsibilities, mission requirements, and the level of proficiency expected for individual positions. In other words, it does an excellent job describing what the enterprise requires.

But do position requirements describe workforce capability?

Position requirements and workforce capability are related, but they are not the same thing. A position requiring expert-level proficiency tells us about organizational demand. It tells us far less about the individual who occupies that position. Operational experience, regional expertise, functional breadth, professional relationships, and accumulated knowledge are largely invisible within the coding framework. The coding framework provides an essential view of the positions that make up the profession. Understanding the capabilities of the workforce itself requires a complementary perspective.

A Better Question

The Human Capital Initiative provided an opportunity to test assumptions that had been forming for some time. The demographic analysis refined those assumptions. The deeper the analysis went, the less it appeared to describe a Security Cooperation specific challenge and the more it resembled a broader Department of the Army workforce conversation.

More importantly, the questions themselves began to change. Instead of asking how to recruit, retain, or train capability, a more fundamental question emerged:

If our workforce systems primarily describe positions, where do we understand the people who occupy them?

Last week, the Department of the Army issued a new workforce memorandum. It opened with a statement that immediately reframed the conversation:

“I believe the Army Civilian Corps is not a ‘support element’—instead it is an indispensable component of our total warfighting capability.”

Under Secretary of the Army

If that’s where the conversation begins, it changes every question that follows.

Stay Tuned for

Part 2: What Question Is the Army Trying to Answer?
The Army Civilian Corps Is Not a Support Element