By Cpl Damian Shovell

IN 1998 a project named the Officer Professional Effectiveness Review for Army (OPERA) examined the professional effectiveness of officers and established what factors constrained officer performance and influenced officer motivation to remain within Army.

The result was the implementation of the Officer Professional Effectiveness Strategy in April 2000, which led directly to the establishment the Army Career Streaming Project DOCM-A and within that the creation of the Military Staff Stream MSS).

Project Director for Career Streaming Lt-Col Luke Carroll says the Army Career Streaming Project has developed as a remarkable success, with 66 officers having now chosen to take advantage of the incentives offered.

“MSS is the larger element and within it there are three specialisations,” he explains.

“The first specialisation is Military Personnel, which is effectively HR.

“The second specialisation is Capability and Acquisition specialisation.

To fall within that specialisation you have to be a qualified Technical Staff Officer, and that means you’ve either gone over to do the course at ATSOC or over to the Royal Military College at Simes, in Shrevenham.”

Lt-Col Carroll says this, however, isn’t entirely exclusive and although the base qualification for Capability and Acquisition is someone who’s done the Technical Staff officers course, there are other qualifications that can be considered.

“The third specialisation is Military Strategy and Policy.”

Of the 66 officers currently in MSS, most are currently situated within Military Personnel and Capability and Acquisition, with Military Strategy and Policy being the smallest of the three specialisations.

“At the moment the important thing [to realise] is that the capability that will be developed in these specialisations is something that will be built over time, because it is a change to the traditional model of officer development.”

MSS career streaming changes the traditional approach by instead of moving officers from both job positions and locations as part of their development, it allows them to concentrate solely within their chosen specialisation.

“The notion behind career streaming is that from about mid-career onwards, MSS officers focus on a particular area of staff expertise in one of those three areas.

From that point on, the priority of their posting effort will be to keep them working in that same area so that they build up their expertise, and the depth of their knowledge.

“The idea over the longer term is that enhanced level of expertise provides Army with staff officers who are more expert in those particular fields.”

Becoming a staff specialist within MSS will not preclude officers from normal GSO employment.

“They still are GSOs and if there is a service need and so forth, they can return – it certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t go back to units anymore.”

This was recently demonstrated with the first MSS officer being appointed as a unit CO, when Lt-Col Peter Shaw, a Military Personnel specialist, was appointed as CO designate of 5/6 RAR.

Employment within MSS is unique.

This is highlighted within the MSS philosophy, which acknowledges it isn’t a corps or a unit, and therefore presents Army with what it describes as Army’s first “virtual element”.

The philosophy described is a thorough and articulate guideline for MSS officers, which seeks to highlight core areas that MSS officers can focus their efforts on and in so doing, can collectively move Career Streaming forward.

Future articles will appear in Army detailing career profiles of officers within MSS, and a look at the future prospects for the stream he said.

MSS information is available by following the information link to the MSS page at
http://intranet.defence.gov.au/armyweb/sites/DOCMA/.

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