From Master Chief Petty Officer of The Navy Public Affairs
WASHINGTON -- A new method of delivering leadership training to chief petty officers (CPO) is now part of the continual growth and development of Sailors. In conjunction with Navy Knowledge Online (NKO), computer-based leadership training is now delivered to every newly selected chief petty officer through a partnership with an online business skills training provider.
The CPO Selectee E-Learning program consists of three Web-based courses offered by the Ninth House Network. Situational Leadership II, Resolving Interpersonal Issues and Managing Change provide approximately 10 total contact hours of training.
The Ninth House CPO E-Learning course is a pilot program and currently only available to new chief petty officers.
Nearly 90 percent of the total 5,418 active-duty, Reserve and TAR
According to Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (SS/AW) Terry Scott (MCPON), the Navy anticipates a great return on this investment.
“This is the beginning of our investment in our future leaders. First and foremost, it provides knowledge and sharpens the skills that will serve these chiefs well into their future as deckplate leaders. Secondly, it exposes them to a new way of learning, and provides insight to the effectiveness and application of distance learning.
“This method of transferring knowledge to our Sailors will become more and more common as we continue our revolution in training,” he said. “And it's essential that the chief petty officers who are taking us into the future, become familiar with it.”
The courses were delivered to the chief selects through a combination of both the Internet and NetCD® packets. NKO provided the portal for the chiefs to access and log in for the training. The CD-ROM packets contained the course's multimedia files, which helped those with bandwidth limitations by avoiding the need to download the files.
This training offered the added benefit of introducing many of the chief selects to NKO. Once they established their NKO account and logged on, the chief's NKO profile also served to log them into the Ninth House Network's training server, eliminating the need for a separate Ninth House Network login process.
“Setting up the training this way enabled us to provide the chiefs with a ‘one login solution’ and seamless NKO integration with the training,” according to Senior Chief Electronic Technician (AW/NAC) Steven L. Pierce, the program’s technical manager. “We were able to track every student's progress through a database which fused data from the individual chiefs, NKO and the Ninth House Network.”
This database was used to generate reports for MCPON and the entire Senior Enlisted Advisory Panel, consisting of all Fleet, Force and Chief of Naval Operations-Directed Command Master Chiefs. These reports detailed the progress of every panel member’s claimancy, commands and individual chiefs. By assigning every chief to a member of the Senior Enlisted Panel and providing them with timely management data, the panel members could track the participation of each chief in their claimancy.
