Air Force News, news from Iraq - Air Force Times

Air Force civilians get their own BOT

A new leadership program for junior civilian Air Force employees began Monday at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., with a class of 25 students.

The two-week course is intended to give civilians leadership training that is more in line with what new uniformed officers receive, Joseph McDade, the force development director, said in a recent interview.

“We have an [Officer Training School] program and [Air and Space Basic Course] for officers,” he said in September. “We get the officers together in one place for acculturation and a common experience. There was no equivalent for the civilians. ... The idea was to give the kind of experience that young civilians need in order to ... hit the ground running.”

A total of 100 students in fiscal 2009 will go through Civilian Acculturation and Leadership Training, but the program could become much larger: The service’s force development team at the Pentagon is working on plans to send as many as 320 civilians per year to the training.

Admittance to the course is selective, and candidates must have worked with the Air Force as a civilian for two to three years; be enrolled in the Copper Cap internship program for contract specialists or the Palace Acquire internship for other career fields; or be graduates of the Student Career Experience Program.

Most of the students will come from support function career fields, such as communications, acquisition, personnel and logistics — areas in which the uniformed cadre have taken large personnel cuts because of force shaping.

The course is modeled after Basic Officer Training, the officer candidate program for recent college graduates without military experience. Sixty percent of the course will focus on leadership development with the remainder on Air Force core values, Air Force history and a war game.

The students will live and eat on base so they can be exposed to the young officers with whom they'll be working.

The course is part of a larger focus, begun by former Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and then-Secretary Michael W. Wynne, on improving career development for civilians, who make up more than 20 percent of the total force. Acting Secretary Michael Donley codified that emphasis Aug. 27 in a policy directive ordering the Air Force to take a harder look at force development.