Abstract:
Job rotation is a personnel development technique that affords personnel with opportunities to achieve greater diversification in their experiences, greater depth in their functional knowledge, and greater exposure to all of the technical competencies associated with working in their chosen career field. This technique has been particularly popular for developing DoD personnel (military and non-military alike) who work in the contracting career field. By rotating personnel to different offices, contracting organizations within the DoD can ensure that their knowledgeable, capable, and proficient workforce continues to grow, learn, and contribute to the organization’s success. However, without adequate office-specific competency models to illustrate what competency strengths exist in each office and what competency-based learning opportunities are available in each, no assurances can be made regarding the benefit to be gained by rotating an employee from one office to another. Thus, this case study explores the workloads of each contracting office that exist within a particular organization in order to 1) identify the unique workload aspects of each office, 2) discover the competency-building strengths and learning opportunities that are available in each office, and 3) develop a practical reference manual of office-specific competency models for future strategic rotation planning purposes. An action research approach was applied to execute this case study. The behavioral event interviewing (BEI) method was used to conduct semi-structured interviews, and qualitative analytical strategies were used to analyze the responses gathered from 25 interview participants. A plethora of existing data from two publicly available databases was also compiled and analyzed. Subsequent results and conclusions focus upon differentiating the five offices that share the greatest contiguity of workload themes since all other contracting offices were found to be distinguishable from one another based on dissimilar workload factor combinations alone. However, a reference manual was developed in which all contracting offices were assessed and office-specific competency models were developed to illustrate the competency-building strengths and learning opportunities available in each office.