Some professions such as armed forces, medical, police and fire services can’t recruit experienced staff from the open job market; they have to develop and promote their staff internally. Looking after staff and their careers at the individual level requires the correct career policies to keep manning structures in balance and allow individual aspirations to be met over the duration of a career. i-logue has developed a decision support tool for managing professional career structures.

The right decisions on recruiting targets, promotion requirements and policies, enable the organisation to meet and manage its staffing requirement. In the steady state scenario, these answers come from historical experience but when organisations change structure or react to demographic pressures, revised career policies are often a matter of educated guess work. In response to this challenge we have developed a quantitative analysis tool to improve career structure decision making.

The tool works in Microsoft Excel so is simple to deploy and can be easily modified to suit the organisation. It allows input of base data such as manpower liabilities, service lengths and grade ceilings and early retirement/release rates. Promotion parameters can be varied either by entering numbers or through ‘click and drag’ interfaces. The application can be configured to obtain data automatically from other sources such as corporate databases. Results are shown graphically and can be easily transferred to other office packages for presentations or reports. The real power of the model is in the underlying mathematics which is unseen to the user. The ability to experiment with manpower policy options and see all parameters in a single interface provides a user friendly way of identifying the best manning solutions.

Modeling of complete career structures allows cause and effect relationships to be seen that would otherwise be difficult to forecast. The example charts show a set of parameters produced for an army manpower structure.

Our model can be used for determining:

• Career structure effects of changing the manning requirement.
• Annual promotion quotas.
• Average promotion ages.
• Grade promotion chances.
• Recruitment rates.
• Manning efficiencies from career policy changes.

Contact Richard House at i-logue for further information.