(upbeat music) - The Air Force has announced the creation of a new information operations technical training school. - The first command, simply must arm our airmen to outtake, outperform, out-partner, out-innovate any potential adversary. - Air Force basic military training has an updated curriculum with a new focus on readiness and lethality. - The first command the Air Force Starts Here. - Hey everybody welcome in. Thanks for the subscribes, stream or download. However, you might be listening in, we're out there on Spotify, Apple podcast, Google play. So wherever you might be, we certainly appreciate you taking time out to join us. I'm Dan Hawkins from the Air Education and Training Command Public Affairs office and your host for this professional development podcast, dedicated to bringing total force big airman, insight tips, tricks and lessons learned from the recruiting training and education world. On the pod today, it's a good what? Episode number 32, if you're keeping track at home. And we sat down remotely with miss Lorelei Gomez, the AETC Accreditation and Certification Branch Chief and Mr. Jason Grove, who is the credentialing project manager about the AETC's credentialing division partnership with industry and academia to test a digital credentialing or badging process, if you will, for individuals within the Air Force learning professionals, bioenvironmental and First Sergeant communities. So a digital badge is a web based version of a credential or learning outcome which can be verified in real time. And the badging process as a whole is an alternative form of credentialing that's currently used in major industry and academic organizations, such as the likes of IBM, Microsoft even NASA, so pretty cool stuff. And in line with the national defense strategy and AETC's initiative to develop the airmen we need, this really talks to advancing force development and will allow airmen to start earning credentials that are personal, verifiable, transferable and shareable. Really in essence, these badges, that earning of these badges is the first step to building that 21st century digital resume. An individual's resume will not only list a skill or a knowledge but that skill or knowledge will be represented visually and you'll be able to also see when and how the individual earned that badge. Ms. Gomez and Mr Grove, do a great job breaking down truly what a digital badge is and how it can change, how credentialing is done in the Air Force, as well as the benefits of the program for both airmen and leaders at all levels. And they'll also talk about that digital 21st century resume and the timeline for this beta-test overall. So let's get to it, episode 32 of the Air Force Starts Here, takes off right now. - I'm Lorelei Gomez and I have spent 12 years on active duty and the last nine years with the Texas National Guard. I made 21 Alpha, which is an Aircraft Maintenance Officer (mumbles) and now I'm serving as the Accreditation and Certification Branch Chief for credentialing under forced development. - And Jason, what about you? How long ago here? - I've actually only been at AETC for about seven months. I spent 21 years in the Air Force as a firefighter and seven and a half years of that I spent as an instructor at the Fire Academy. But after I retired, I ended up working for the army for a few years as Instructional Assistant Specialist, which really led to a part of the program that we're using or we're doing right now, when we, I was gonna be 1750 or the Instructional Assistant Specialist badges as we developed those. - So this is a really interesting beta-test and I think we have to start, what a digital credential actually is. So in layman's terms, what is a digital credential? - Well, a digital credential can be anything that is a digital representation of a credential. But what we're really getting at here are digital badges, which is a type of digital credential. And what that is, it's a web enabled version of a credential. So what it does is it shows electronic information about skills that a earner has earned or they've achieved. So we take these badges and they have criteria that the earners have to meet to represent the skills that they've achieved to actually earn that badge. - So I just wanted to add, I think the key for the digital credentials, it's about the metadata embedded within that digital credential. It's about being able to see the actual description, all of the related skills, the criteria that earners had to do and the evidence that the earner had to provide in order to earn a digital credential and that's the key piece of the metadata. - And it's really interesting because this program seems like it has the potential to be a very unlike the traditional learning history that we've had in the Air Force. And so Jason, what does that really mean? - Well, currently we have a lot of different ways to represent training that, say airmen or civilians in the Air Force get. That we have certificates, we have diplomas and licenses. But what these do, is we're concentrating on representing skills that aren't otherwise represented some other way. And the big difference between what we're doing now and this project is that we're one, centralizing the data. So as Lorelei was talking about the data that goes along with these badges, that it's real time data about what individuals actually did. Statistics and diplomas don't show what individuals actually do to achieve that other than if somebody wants to look at the objectives from a course that they attended or that kind of thing. But what we can do is, with these badges, it's not only show what the individual did on their own but we can represent that and we can reproduce it anytime somebody wants to look that up. So they can click on these badges and I say, click through a computer, through the email or some other social network a user or someone who wants to view it and click on that badge and see exactly what the earner did to earn that badge. - So Dan, if I may share one of the reasons why I joined this project or decided to come to AETC about a year and a half ago, I was approached by AETC and they said we have, we're trying to develop this digital badging system, would you be interested in doing it? And I was very excited to come and be a part of this project because I felt that, like you said, it's very different from our traditional means. I was like, wow, this is our opportunity and I joke about it sometimes and say, this is our opportunity to take our World War II Air Force training to the 21st century. This is what industry and academia is doing. That's how they're capturing those skill sets that we often don't have the ability to capture within our Air Force through traditional means. So this provides us a path and an avenue for our airmen to get recognition for those skills that they have and are not able to show anywhere else. - Yeah and this seems really interesting because our national defense strategy, it really talks to the need to deliberately develop air and space professionals through a competitive approach for force development, talent management and one of general Webb's priorities obviously is developing the airmen we need and how specifically Lorelei does this program fit into those priorities? - So this is right in line with those priorities. It's how do we take that competitive approach to course development and talent management. And this project has the potential to help develop our airmen from day one. It's from the recruiting cases, what spectrum of skills do they have even prior to coming to the Air Force? How do we recognize those skills? How do we place them in the right positions as they're coming in? Once we have them in our Air Force we can utilize this through talent development as well. How do we align them with on map opportunities to further sharpen their skills as they're progressing to their career? And then eventually to the transition piece, how does everything they've learned within airports, how does that translate to industry so they're able to start that second career? - Now, one of the examples I would give on that, we just did Instructional Assistant specialist career field and develop badges for them. We initially were looking at specifically the GS1750s, which is the Instructional Assistant Specialist and we were developing badges specifically for them. But along with that question, Dan, we expanded out and very quickly figured out that these skills that we're trying to identify are not just for the 1750s. They're also for the rest of the 1700 series or military that wanna be Instructional Assistant Specialist and they can gain these skills to be able to fill the jobs they want. So what we're doing is we're developing these learning pathways so that they can take charge of their own careers and develop skills that will allow them to develop professionally and personally for whatever job they want. - Yeah and I also found it interesting that one of our big pushes here under the advancing force development is expanding our strategic partnerships and you guys aren't doing this effort necessarily alone. You have a partnership with an organization called Credly. Can you tell us a little bit about that? - Yeah, so we entered into a cooperative research agreement with Credly. We looked at a number of different companies that are offering digital badging and they were the leaders when it came to the technology. We wanted to have a technology enabled solution to our problems with some of the leaders out there. They're working with folks such as (mumbles) IBM, Google, Amazon, Harvard, Penn State. So they're known just throughout industry and academia. So they seem to be a perfect fit for what we wanted to do and it's not about just the perfect fit. It's about us being able to learn from everything they've been developing over the last 15 years and be able to build on what they've learned in order to get the best badging opportunities for our airmen within the Air Force. - Yeah, well with that Lorelei, what we are saying, they also offered us all that experience but we got that experience to help us walk through different badging processes. So as we develop the process for the Air Force, they bring in that expertise to help us but they also sit in our meetings and give us their expertise and lead us down the right way so we can develop this process to where it will be most beneficial to the Air Force. - Yeah, so I'm curious, we we've talked about a lot of things, but I think a lot of airmen might be curious, like, how does this actually work in execution? Like what does it look like in layman's terms to go from today to earning a digital badge? - So for our airmen, and I'm gonna say how does it affect our airmen? It'll be pretty transparent for our airmen when it comes to earning. Well, we have a landing page in where they will have all of the different skills represented and they can go in and decide which of these general badges they're gonna earn. And once they click on those icons, it'll give them all of the information they need to know in order to earn that particular credential. So for our airmen, it'll be pretty intuitive. I think the piece that we're trying to figure out and trying to establish through this research and cooperative agreement is the actual issuing evaluation piece and the building of the digital credentials and I'll let Jason expand on that piece. - Okay, sounds good. Yeah, so the front end on this, like the behind the scenes portion of it is, as she said, developing the badges. So we've been working with like I said, the Instructional Assistants Specialists, the 1750 career field. And we worked with the career field manager and a work group of subject matter experts to put together or first identify skills that they find valuable for the career field. And then each one of those skills we've developed a badge. So the badge includes of course description so that if somebody looks at the badge they know what skills are being presented or represented by that, but also the earning criteria. Now the earning criteria, what we're shooting for is not only some kind of knowledge that they've attained or skill they have attained but how they apply that. And that really lends to the difference between some of the credentials we have that are current but as opposed to the digital credentials, because what we can do is prove that they have actually achieved something as opposed to just sitting in a class. So once we put all that together, then we have to incorporate that into the process for earning it. That's what we're trying to get out now is the earners process on how they, as Lolerei said, identify which badges they wanna earn but also in the Air Force, how it's gonna work in trying to apply for that badge, who has to approve the badge and that's the process we're working on right now. - And so at the end of the day and we'll talk about it from both the airmen and the leader's perspective, but what truly is in this for our airmen in terms of the benefits of this program. - So from a leader's perspective, this data rich digital badges, they're gonna be able to provide that improved data analytics for our supervisors and our senior leaders. What is the spectrum of skills their airmen are bringing to the squadrons, to the units or within their groups or organizations? They'll be able to really look at how can they continue to develop airmen today for tomorrow's future? What are the skills and identify those gaps that we're missing so they can make that data informed decision in order to continue to develop our airmen for future mission needs. That's on for the leadership piece. Jason, do you wanna take the airmen piece? - Yeah, definitely. From the airmen's side, it does a whole host of different things. As Lorelei kind of alluded to earlier, airmen coming in, it can better identify the skills that airmen coming into the Air Force have and help them identify what positions or what jobs, what specialties that they would best fit in as they come in the military. But on the other side, it could, once they're in, well, now it could become a competition where they just like video games right now, are you show off what kind of achievements you get through a video game. It's really similar to that where you can try to figure out, try to compete on how many badges you can get. But simpler than that, it develops learning pathways for airmen. So it not only tells them what what skills they need to get to the certain positions, but how to get there. It tells them what training they need or what they need to achieve to be able to earn those badges to get those skills. And then later on when they try to get out, the potential is there for them to use these to as sort of align these badges with industry, so that as airmen transition out of the Air Force, they can better align with industry and hopefully transition into a career outside of the Air Force. - Also Dan, what I wanted to add here is we really want to encourage our airmen to become lifelong learners. And through the use of digital badging, digital credentialing, we're trying to promote that. One of the things that as the airmen are learning their badges, we also give them recommendations. This is your next step. We recommend you looking at this particular badging series in order to acquire skills. So those are the types of things that as we're developing our system and our platform we're incorporating with each of the career functional managers as we're working through what's important to them. - Yeah and another interesting aspect that I read about in the material was that many of our airmen have technical and other soft type of skills that are unnoticed because maybe they're not in their primary AFSC but they're not really captured anywhere so nobody knows that an airman might have a hidden talent. - Oh, absolutely. I think one of the examples I like to use with our senior leaders when we're breaking digital badging is I give the example of our last deployment for my particular national guard unit. We were deployed and one of our aircraft sustained damage. It happened that one of our national guardsmen worked for the FedEx depot side of the house. And he was a certified AMP mechanic but nowhere in his records is he qualified through AMP certification in the Air Force side of the house. So although he was fully qualified to perform the depot type repairs on the aircraft, we had to jump through so many hoops in order to get the approval for him to work on that. If we had that 21st century resume for our senior leaders to have, we would have been able to move that aircraft much quicker off that runway and so the mission could continue. - And you mentioned that the 21st century resume and that's, that's part of this program as a beta-test. Can you talk a little bit about what that really means and what it entails? - Jason? - Sure. So the 21st century airmen's resume is a basic digital representation. Existing resumes and similar documentation is very static and it has to be continually updated by the individual to make sure that it's current. The 21st century resume working with these digital badges, digital credentials, really is a fluid dynamic system. So as changes are made the individual doesn't really have to do much. If they earn a badge, if that batch changes, unless they don't meet the criteria anymore, then that badge will change with them. So it gives them a lot more opportunity and a lot more ability to represent themselves how they want. So as they add more skills and coincidentally I just received an email not too long ago, specifically asking about this particular information. And they were one of the individuals that earned one of our badges was asking, well, I'm going to just see all this on the bottom of my email? And what my response to them was you can add whatever you want to there. So as you show these badges, it's really up to the user on what they show. However, from the Air Force standpoint, when the commanders can actually look at this, they'll be able to see all the different skills and see all the different changes as they happen instantly and it won't take the individual having to update it to be able to show what current skills they have. - Dan, also the 21st century gives the airmen the ability to show as much information as they want and as little information as they want. So, and they don't have to completely rewrite like your typical resume. They don't have to rewrite it to show whatever it is they're looking at applying for. The other piece for the 21st century resume is as a supervisor or possibly a hiring authority, now I can go and click on a particular badge and actually see the evidence of whatever it is they had to do in order to earn that particular credential. And I think that's the piece that adds the excitement for digital credentialing is not only am I telling you that I'm qualified or have done project management. Now I can attach some of those project management documents that I've worked on. And me as the person looking at taking a person with project management, now I can actually see their skills in action and they provided me the evidence and I can make a more informed decision, is this the person that I need on my team or not? - So as this beta-test goes through and you guys start this process, what does the timeline look like? Where are you at project wise here? - So project wise, we just completed our first specialty, which was the 1750s that the learning professionals, as Jason mentioned earlier, we're getting ready to kick off the first sergeants. The first sergeants is another one that, I'll get a little bit off topic right now, but they're one of those folks that go out and do a developmental special experience or a specialized experience that are out of their career field for two, three years. And when they come back, a lot of the supervisors don't know what to do with this person because they don't know how to acknowledge that skill they learn. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to give the First Sergeant something concrete to bring back to their supervisors and say, look, I have delegation authority, I have a mentoring coaching ability and how do I integrate them back into the squadrons there? So that was a little off topic. We have two other specialties after that. We're working with the bioenvironmental folks and then of course, near and dear to my heart, the aircraft maintenance officers at the end. We're slated to go through February of 2021 and at that point we will make a recommendation to the Air Force and to our boss on how do we implement it or is it even implementable across the entire Air Force? - Well, definitely some exciting stuff and working to help airmen get credit for what they already know and what they might be able to do or what they can do is certainly a pretty exciting thing in the force development arena and helping develop the airmen we need. I really thank you guys both for your time today. - You're welcome, it was our pleasure. We're very excited about the project. We are excited about the potential it has for our airmen and our Air Force as a whole. - Thank you Dan, we appreciate your time. - Lots to unpack here on this episode of The Air Force Starts Here. It really was fascinating to understand how this program can help airmen be lifelong learners and aid AETC in helping develop the airmen we need to be successful in today's joint all domain environments. Big thanks to Ms. Gomez and Mr. Grove for sitting down remotely with us. As a reminder, you can follow Air Education and Training Command and the AETC command team on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as catch up on all the latest news at www.aetc.af.mil. For our entire AETC public affairs team, I'm Dan Hawkins, (mumbles). We'll talk to you next time on the Air Force Starts Here. (upbeat music)