HEADQUARTERS, NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND, PATUXENT RIVER, Md. – NAVAIR’s Career Planning and Development Division, part of its Human Capital Management Dept., won the Department of the Navy Organizational Impact Award as part of the DoN Human Resources and Equal Employment Opportunity Awards for Excellence.
Specifically, the award recognizes the impact the team made on restructuring the completion process for NAVAR’s mandatory training classes, improving and modernizing the training content and reducing costs associated with end-of the-year workload for the NAVAIR workforce. Mandatory training is required annually by executive order, federal statute, regulation or the Secretary of the Navy and covers topics such as security, privacy, ethics, government accountability and diversity, among others.
“The Human Capital Management Dept. is continuously looking for ways to most efficiently and effectively accomplish human capital management requirements,” said Cindy Worcester, director of the Human Capital Management Dept. “Mandatory training is one of those areas, and it was an obvious opportunity to offer the ‘test-out’ feature, which is being replicated beyond NAVAIR. Workforce development is the primary focus of the Human Capital Management Dept. and is critical to the success of all commands.”
Jenny Russell, director of the Career Planning and Development Division, said it was an honor for the team to be selected for this award.
“We continuously strive to streamline our processes, which enables NAVAIR employees to focus on mission performance and outcomes to better serve our Sailors and Marines,” she said.
Working with subject matter experts to identify the core content and develop a “test-out” feature, the team, comprised of employees from the Human Capital Management and Security departments, condensed 14 courses into four modules by bundling key content by subject matter area. This resulted in significant time saved — on average, five hours per employee — equating to approximately 140,085 hours saved per year with a projected cost savings of more than $5 million annually.
“This project was critical to delivering important training in the least disruptive way possible,” Richie Grau, head of the Security Dept., said. “The new training model will also allow us the ability to measure knowledge retention and correlate training to deficiencies in program areas.”
The consolidated training courses, paired with the test-out feature, reduced time spent on mandatory training significantly and increased NAVAIR’s overall training completion rate.
Tania Dawson, who helped ensure cost, schedule and performance were met, said, “To me, winning this award means my team’s innovative work products have been validated as best practices and recognized as paving the way to enable efficiencies with effective training delivery. Mandatory training is one of NAVAIR’s most critical training deliveries that occurs annually, and it is great to be recognized for making an impact to organizational performance.”
In the future, the team plans to incorporate the training into the command’s new learning management system to make it more interactive and effective for employees.