Train With Industry to Retain and Develop Army Talent

By Col. Gregory S. Johnson, Director, Officer Personnel Management Directorate, U.S. Army Human Resources Command

To retain and develop the best talent in a competitive employment environment , while modernizing our skills and experiences needed for Multi-Domain Operations (MDO), the Army needs to expose officers, warrant officers and noncommissioned officers to civilian U.S. companies and how they operate. The Training With Industry program is a key strategic readiness builder, modernization incubator and leader development program. It’s also a retention tool that is not utilized to its full potential. The program can be leveraged however, to provide a significant return on investment for our Army, and helps us drive change in our organizations.

Exposing our talent to new ways of doing business, new experiences and different organizational cultures will open up our Army’s next generation of change agents to new, innovative and creative ideas. They will learn creative ways our Army can modernize to better prepare for the Army of 2028 and the strategic challenges we face now and into the future. Different experiences matter and exposure is critical to our modernization efforts and shaping our strategic leader development to meet the needs of MDO.

The TWI Program began in the 1970s in response to the Army’s critical need for officers with state-of-the-art skills in industrial practices and procedures not found in military or civilian education programs.

The first students participated exclusively in programs which supported the development of material acquisition and logistics management skills. Today, the TWI Program includes training programs which support marketing, supply chain management, artificial intelligence, human resources, analytics, and more. This should be expanded to incorporate more of our operators, exposing them to concepts and capabilities we will need in an MDO Army.

TWI is a year-long program which provides extensive exposure to managerial techniques and state-of-the-art industry practices and technology found in corporate America. Some of our Army’s most important corporate and cultural partners offer TWI fellowships. Companies like USAA, Google, Lockheed Martin, Cisco Systems, United Airlines and UPS.

During the fellowship, Soldiers are immersed in their corporate experience. They work in corporate facilities and report to their leadership who provide the Army an evaluation of the Soldier at the end of the fellowship. TWI fellows are expected to learn but also to use their skills and talent to provide value to the corporate partner during their tenure.

Following a TWI assignment, Soldiers incur a three-year service obligation and complete a utilization assignment which leverages the skills learned while training and working with industry. Fellows will often develop and lead programs for their Army career field based on their TWI experiences.

The Army utilizes about 100 TWI fellowships each year. We have had success, but we can improve this further and drive different experiences by increasing the breadth and depth of TWI fellowships; adding both additional military specialties but also reviewing our current opportunities in order to ensure they are meeting our modernization and leader development needs and outcomes.

One key to ensuring our return on investment (ROI) is for engaged leaders across proponents and organizations to manage the program for the benefit of their career field and ultimately to prepare for an MDO focused Army.

An effective case study is what we did in the Army Human Resources community. In order to further develop TWI opportunities for Army HR professionals we took a number of steps to reshape the experiences to directly tie to our modernization efforts:

• We linked assignments following the TWI experience to jobs that are modernizing HR processes, data and systems.
• We visited our TWI officers in the corporate setting multiple times during their fellowship to ensure the program was meeting the Army’s needs and to get feedback from both the officer and their industry leadership.
• We linked assignments following the TWI experience to jobs that are modernizing HR processes, data and systems.

One of the key experiences our HR professionals have during TWI is their exposure to modern technologies and business practices. The kinds of modern skills they will need to support the Army of the future and new technologies like Integrated Personnel and Pay System – Army. These HR Soldiers are exposed to leading industry software like Oracle’s PeopleSoft, software engineering and testing, hardware maintenance, strategic HR operations, business analytics, and how data science is applied to HR to support business goals.

These experiences have allowed the Army’s HR community to begin to build a cadre of officers and noncommissioned officers who have been ‘upskilled’ in technologies and skills that we can use to drive HR modernization toward a data-driven talent management approach.

TWI is not just for IPPS-A or the HR community. We face a number of challenges in Army modernization and in preparing for an MDO-capable Army. The Army of 2028 will be operating in an increasingly complex and technologically dominated world and TWI experiences can provide a strong cadre of change agents that can be utilized Army wide.

To meet our Army’s current and future needs the Army and its Proponent leaders should use the TWI program more broadly. TWI represents a low cost, high ROI option for upskilling and retaining our best talent across ranks and skill sets. The kind of talent our Army needs right now to continue to modernize, compete with near peer threats around the globe, and make real the vision of our Army’s leadership.

Colonel Johnson is a career Army Adjutant General Corps Officer. He was a Distinguished Military Graduate of the University of San Francisco, earning a Bachelor of Arts in United States History. He also holds a master’s degree from the United States Army War College, a master’s degree of Policy Management from Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute, and a master’s degree in Education from the University of Oklahoma.