Experience Accumulation in Military Workforce Planning

Workforce planning is at the core of military strategic planning. We focus on a critical aspect of many occupations in military workforces: the on-the-job training received by an inexperienced mentee under the supervision of an experienced mentor. We introduce the Experience Accumulation Module to allow the Athena Lite workforce modelling software to consider experience gained through on-the-job training. We compare four models and illustrate their differences with detailed results and analysis: (a) promotion requires minimum time in level; (b) promotion requires upgrade gained through physical resource usage; (c) promotion requires physical resource usage and Mentors; and (d) promotion through physical resource-constrained upgrade. We verify model implementation in Athena Lite by comparing our results from (a) through (c) with a well-known continuous workforce model. We then increase the complexity of our model in (d) and study the impact of resource levels on the upgrade process and the health of the population.