the air force has announced the creation of a new information operations technical training school the first command simply must arm our airmen to outrank out-perform 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 [Music] everybody welcome into the air force starts here and thanks for the subscribe stream or download however you might be listening in today if you get a chance to throw us some stars or even a review we certainly would appreciate that as well my name is dan hawkins from the air education and training command public affairs team and your host for this professional development podcast dedicated to the recruiting training and education world and today's episode is all about modernization in the context of advancing force development and transforming the way we learn two of the four priority areas here in air education and training command and on the pod we sat down virtually with miss lindsey fredman and chief master jennifer bai from the air force career development academy they're located out at keesler air force base as well as massage nikita gunter massar and stephen gray and master and dylan peterson cdc riders in their respective career fields about an ongoing renewed effort to work with both career field managers and cdc riders to reimagine the services cdc design and delivery model to airmen in order to bring it into the 21st century learning environment and this is an effort really that ties into general brown's sea saf action order a which is airman and really about advancing force development to develop the airmen that we need for the future fight and so miss fredman and chief buy will talk about the strategic vision about what afsita does the tangible benefits to airmen from this approach to modernization for the cdc courses that centers on rapid curriculum development and agile curriculum updates with an emphasis on tasks that are are mission focused so a lot of great strategic viewpoints uh this project has chief massart and bass's stamp of approval as well and then massart and gunner massart and gray and massar and peterson will talk about the modernization process how it's going for their respective career fields and then the benefits that the airmen will gain by having the use of interactive student-centric instruction uh with focus on performance-based assessments and realistic scenarios and if you remember and most of you i guarantee you do the legacy cdc's that use the textbook style delivery where you read about 100 or 600 pages and you just take a multiple choice test this is going to look completely different let's get to it episode 54 of the air force starts here kicks off right now well i am lindsey fredman the director of the air force career development academy down here under second air force at kiesler i actually came to join the air force as a civilian about seven months ago in december and prior to that i worked for customs and border protection as the learning technologies program manager working primarily on online training and prior to that i am very proud to say that i came out of the army's instructional assistant specialist intern program where i worked both for the infantry school as well as for the maneuver center of excellence um non-commissioned officer school so that's a little bit about my background and chief buy you you have a great job there at second air force working uh with ms fredman and team tell us uh a little bit about you all right well i am the superintendent of the academy and i um i because of our recent transition from air university i've actually the the old timer of the organization i've been with afsita since september of 2016 and i have when we were part of the organization that was at maxwell concert under air university and prior to that i was a senior nco academy instructor for a short while um and i've been in the air force for quite a bit of time so i i personalised by trade have to have done time um as a first sergeant as well um so um the enlisted force with all of those things the entire enlisted forces is important to me and so being part of a mission that's that's here to train and enlist the personnel um and make their their job progression better is exciting and and i'm thrilled with with what afsita is doing now to make that better for our airmen and absolutely delighted to be joined today by some actual cdc riders you when you're taking your cdc you're always wondering who is it that's actually writing all of this content and and that's an actual uh thing that our enlisted airmen get to do and so massan gunner tell us a little bit about yourself hello i'm master sergeant requiena gunter i am the aeromedical service technician a foreign cbc writer down in fort sam houston i've been in this position since october of 2018 and um this is my first time dealing with the course in from this aspect and i'm very excited about aceta's transition with their new development process and moving forward with a more innovative and interactive course for our airmen and we get a a two for one special in vehicle maintenance today let's start with you massa and gray tell us a little bit about your air force path hi i'm master sergeant stephen gray and i am one of three of the vehicle management cdc riders and i have been in the air force coming up on 17 years now i joined the cdc rider team in august of 2018 so this is my first go really starting to develop cdc's but i sat in with master sergeant dylan peterson who will introduce himself here in a second but he was he'd been around for a few years prior to that so he developed the old school cdc's and uh it was really nice to be able to to see the tail end of that but i'm also like sergeant gunter very excited to see the new process and be able to innovate new concepts and interactive training to our vehicle management folks we typically learn by touching and doing things so this will be i think great training for our folks in vehicle management and sergeant peterson i i think what sergeant gray was saying is you're the old timer here that's correct sir i've uh i've been doing the cdc game since uh november of 2016. so i've been through a full production cycle for our for our vehicle management cdc's and i'm you know as everybody else has said i'll echo it i'm really excited to to take this to the next level um i got into this job because i'm very passionate about our career field and uh in in my 17 years i've seen plenty of shortcomings um with the way that we've been training our airmen in the past and i think this is a great first step to get that foundational training done so that the trainers can take them out on the shop floor and take them to the next level so i'm very excited about all this so ms fredman chief i kind of wanted to start with you for for those that may not know or ever heard of it what is the air force career development academy so today we are we are the air force air force school development academy and we develop and deliver career development courses in support of upgrade training and and the weighted airman promotion system and those who are not familiar with with us being called the air force career development academy or afsita as we go by um may know us by one of our previous names we've been through a few we actually date back to we were we were part of training um before the air force became a service when we were still under the army uh air corps and then we were initially established at gunter um as the extension course institute so eci a lot of people remember our eci days i know when i did my my cdc's as a young airmen it was still eci so that was what was printed on them the extension course institute and then we became affiato the air force institute for advanced distributed learning so that was um for for a number of years that was what we were called and then oh my goodness i'm i'm forgetting whether it was 2008 or 2012 i'm pretty sure was you know 2008 i think we went under air university as the air under a4 there at maxwell gunter um and then um became the air force career development academy a named organization under the thomas m barnes center for enlisted air uh for enlisted education at aaron university and that was the the event that occurred in 2012 if i if i remember that correctly but so over time our mission was all all training job related training we had um enlisted uh pme that was done by by correspondence courses a variety of specialized courses but over the years through our do our name changes and and just restructures in the air force in a variety of ways to the the air force training program um professional military education was taken out of our scope and then put you know under the barn center and a different directorate and we focused turned our focus more to just job-related training for upgrade training for our enlisted personnel so so right now that is the majority that is our courses are those career development courses but we've been around a long time it's just our name now is probably the newest that we've had in a while and then in in 2019 is when it was approved to realign under second air force here at keesler air force base and then i physically moved july of last year um goodness it's been a whirlwind the last few years just going through that transition but i've been here a year and our first staff and started coming on board we had one in september and then the rest followed in november as far as the first big wave and then we've been growing but yep that does what we do and so how does afsita's mission tie into general webb's priorities of not only advancing force development but from a modernization perspective perhaps transforming the way airmen learn what's really your charter yeah absolutely so um you know as chief by just mentioned there's a long legacy for career development courses and one thing i always like to share is that a few months ago i was at the world war ii museum with my husband and had a great display on how the army in particular mobilized and trained people off the street to get the mobilized to go and fight in world war ii and it's a great display if you've never been there you should go and as i was looking around i looked at a bunch of training documents that they use these manuals that they use to train the force and i took a picture of it with my phone texted it to chief by and said holy cow our cdcs are in the world war ii museum and it is you just heard the long legacy we came out of that correspondence um program i was surprised to hear that it was still called call the correspondence program to a degree when i joined the air force um because we've kind of gone away from that for so long so in support of aetc's priority to transform the way we learn we're transforming the way that we design and develop our curriculum we will no longer be providing just a pdf or a textbook to read and calling that training what we were wanting to do and what we are doing is creating interactive immersive student-centric content and and training online where students can access at any time anywhere in any sort of environment and really complete the knowledge portion of their upgrade training we're also looking at we are developing courses that don't just focus on knowledge and as i'm sure mass sergeant gunter and and sergeant peterson and graham will probably talk about um what what we are doing is not just focusing on the basic rote memorization and what you need to do to complete a multiple choice test we're giving them actual scenarios we're giving them the ability to practice in a virtual environment some of the skills and the actual tasks they need to do on the job and so that is a huge shift in the way that cdcs have been designed and developed previously that by inserting technology that you can use on the afnet we were able to get at some things that historically we just weren't able to get to before and so that really is going to help us and is helping us transform the way that we develop focusing on the tasks focusing on the mission and with this new approach we're going to get a lot better results and chief one thing that really struck out at me from the briefing that was given to general webb a few weeks back was the idea that this whole idea really came about because you guys recognized and maybe it was a team effort to recognize it but the current product it just wasn't meeting the need career field managers or airmen or the force development process in general yes i think i mean we've all seen over over the last however many years you know technologies being leveraged in a lot of ways but we had we had some some struggles or some challenges um that um whether it was different software we were trying to get and you know not being authorized on on the afnet or whether it was challenges with watts testing or because we do have you know students doing training in deployed locations where they may not be able to access material or take a test in a test control facility and there's just so many um so many constraints and and with processes and the systems we have some some antiquated systems that are actually there they're ending um their life cycle um very soon in october um so it was we've known we needed to modernize um and but every time that we tried there was another challenge and i think we just um because of the amount of workload that we had we we kept on doing what we could do and that was um using you know the word um word documents and and exporting them to to a pdf um so yeah they recognized the need but we just didn't know how to get after it and so so really move into second air force um move into key survey because really since we've no longer had that pme arm i'm not sure that really we it made sense to keep us under air university and so putting us under second air force where we're under the same command as the training squadrons that that have the cdc writers that are that are providing that subject matter expertise that we need i think that helps us out a lot and because we we align better in the training mission i mean it opened up some resources for us that i don't think um we would have been able to we had not been successful in in getting before and so and i think it's kind of a i don't know just the stars aligned in a variety of ways and to be able you know that the move happened and we were able to to coincide when you're getting a whole new staff what better time to just end new systems right that was kind of there was no way around that those systems were sun setting so to be able to come up with new processes there's no reason to keep doing it the old way we still got some challenges but but now's the time to modernize so yeah chief and i talk about this quite a bit it's very rare in government in general that you get a chance to take any program and start from scratch but to take a legacy program and really get the opportunity to modernize it transform it and make it make it something that our force not only today but of the future needs is really exciting and it's very humbling i think for all of us working in afceta we're really excited to show everyone where we're headed uh but definitely if if we hadn't had that kick to um get off some systems and make it work um there's no telling how long it could have continued but thankfully with under chief buys eye we were able to uh to make that move and heading towards great success so sergeant peterson i kind of wanted to ask you having been in the cdc game for as long as you have your words um what did you see about the old method and what was your vision uh before this project came along was this something that was kind of thought about but just never acted upon or uh you know what what's your take on that um so it's actually very interesting that you asked that so um maybe maybe a year before we really started hearing about this this app cedar reorganization and all the new options that we're going to come out with um our career field manager for vehicle management actually charged sergeant gray and i to to come up with a way to make this happen um and he told us if that meant we needed to leave asida and go another route that that's what we needed to do because he really wanted to see this um so when we started hearing about uh affcita you know doing this reorganization and we started hearing the rumors that a learning management system was going to be a possibility um i think we both got a little bit of excited because that made our lives a whole lot easier that afsita was going to be able to accommodate that direction that our cfm wanted to go but as far as as looking at it now and considering what i know about the previous cdc's it was to me it was very evident that half-seed is old processes even though we were now using word and converting them into pdfs um they they had been modified versions of the days when we used to mail back and forth and we actually still have a cabinet in our office that we need to clean out but it is filled with mailing supplies you know because at one point you you'd write your manuscript and you would send it through the us postal service over to asceto or eci or whatever their whatever their name was at that time and they would mark it up and then they would send it back to you so as i mean as we embraced email of course that got a little bit easier but it was it really felt like everything was based on an antiquated process and because of that uh the production timelines were really long um something about vehicle management in particular is we have a lot of cdc's cdcs we actually have six sets of cdc's that we produce and that equates out to 14 volumes so that covers all of our five level cdc's for a couple shred outs that we have and our core career field and then it's also the seven level cdc's so you can imagine that going through uh a hand-typed production cycle and sending all of those volumes back and forth is a very long process for us so i'm really looking forward to having a new process that's streamlined and uh and ready to accept updates in a much quicker fashion so that's i mean as as the old guy around here that's my take on it for sure sergeant gray you know as you embarked on this process you and sergeant peterson um you know how helpful has it been to have an organization like afita there to kind of uh help guide you along that path uh it's been great as sergeant peterson said our cfm cast us and um sergeant peterson was actually finishing up the cdc's that we currently have in the field at the time so he was pretty busy uh wrapping those things up and kind of going through that old process still back and forth with the iss is that ceta and uh i was new so i took on the responsibility of trying to find out how we could incorporate our cdc's into a modern way of teaching a way that is kind of the way that the industry uh outside the air force teaches so i looked into blackboard and i looked into canvas and a bunch of other ways of designing that stuff but i had no training in it so i got a hold of i think it was uh miss garcia who now works at afsita at the time she was working uh under someone else but she was doing uh training classes for blackboard and how to design tests and how to create blackboard courses which helped a lot but learning that stuff online on a computer and then trying to incorporate it myself was extremely difficult so i was really struggling and and i was really uh kind of sweating creating our cdc's uh the mass amount of material that we have and putting that into an online course uh in the timeline that our career field manager wanted it so when like sergeant peterson said we heard about afsita going this direction i was more than happy to uh basically put that portion that i was working on on pause and wait on afceta to tell me what they were going to come up with so we were eager to hear it and i think we we bugged chief by quite a bit when it was just her more so because our old cdc's had just hit them hit the market so we had a lot of things that needed to be uh fixed with those and she was the only one that have seated at the time so we were bugging her with multiple things i'm sure she she probably got tired of us but um it was nice to know that we were going to have someone share that burden of developing this with us and i don't want to make it sound like it's a burden because it's going to be great when it's all online but right now everybody's learning how to do this we're we've taken some stuff with fc to some training to really make these things great and uh working with our iss right now uh we're we're learning as he's learning i think he's learning at a lot faster rate than we are but um it's awesome that i'm no longer i guess the the brunt of this we can put it on fceta and let them tell us what to do it's kind of nice and sergeant gunner for for your career field specifically what did you identify with your cooling field manager as really the need for your aflc um for my career field we actually um kind of jumped ahead and last year i did have the ability to start a course in blackboard so we were able to get a course running however not on the level where we are with afsita in their new process but we were already in blackboard i had a better course going with a certain number of airmen um basically the plan that afsita has was my same mindset as well as my cfm during the time and so again we kind of fast forwarded through blackboard and then once we had that course up and running i later found out that the contract was ending so i was heartbroken with all the work that was put into that because it was not easy luckily here at fort sam houston i have a blackboard administrator so he was able to help me get everything up and running and get like the basic shell going and so that process was great but again once afsita came down with their new plan and what their vision was which i feel like we were on the same page we decided not to divorce afsita because that's where we were going because of the timeline of how long it was taking to get our cdcs uh published for the airmen to start using them i had recommended to my cfm you know blackboard is going away this is absita's vision same path as ours i think we should stay married to them because are the words that i was i was using um because they have the support and so with blackboard and trying to get the videos up and running my vision was to make it similar to our air force information training with the live videos the progress checks scenarios where you had to move the mouse and select different objects or items to move forward it was all my plan but of course i don't have a support system that afsita has so i wanted to stay married with them and see where they were taking their process and i feel like where we're going is great although i did not have the taws in my plan um for our for our program but i feel like staying with them and seeing where this goes they have a support system we're not alone in getting this process done is a better choice than kind of moving off and trying to do our own thing at this point so miss fredman chief i've heard a lot about how great the interaction is and the helpfulness of being affiliated with afsita and it kind of ties to you know different curry fields just trying to figure it out you guys are really like a unifying force here uh but i wanted to talk about the actual process or steps uh really to to cdc modernization sure so so first i just want to say you know it's a good thing that one of our the first cdc's that we're modernizing is the uh religious affairs journeyman course because we get to interact with a lot of chaplains who have helped us with our you know marital counseling um that has helped us be very supportive uh with sergeant gunter and others um yeah so our process is a little bit different i think everyone in training is familiar with the addie model which is a now that you analyze um what needs to be taught you design it then you actually start developing it you implement it and then you evaluate it and for a lot of developers both inside the air force and outside it's a very linear process you have to complete one before the next well as you've heard and i think sergeant peterson said it really brilliantly when he was speaking you could see how long it would take just to draft something and send it back and wait for a review and then it would come back and you'd have to make edits send it back all of that so we're doing analysis um if we were to take a career field education and training plan and look at the number of specialized tasks they need us to train for some of our career fields there's 200 or plus 200 plus of tasks that need to be trained in their cdcs so if we were to just focus on analysis at first that is 200 and something tasks that we have to have the cdc writers explain to us because we are not subject matter experts that's what the cdc writer's role is in a lot of ways we've changed the cdc writer role because they're no longer writing manuscripts what we're really asking them to do is break down each task and really tell us what does this task look like in the field and how would you know that your airman has actually mastered it so that is the crux of everything it all starts right there so if we were to wait for our cdc writers to go through the diligent work of writing out all the task analysis worksheets and filling them all out um we could it could be six months before we move on to the next phase so instead we're using this agile method so for example if sergeant gunter has finished a block of test analysis worksheets for say the first module that we agreed to beforehand this is kind of what your course is going to look like we're going to take these tasks and group them as she finishes those then the instructional designers look at those tasks write learning objectives and immediately jump into making the design guide making the plan for how that lesson is going to be laid out and once we have the plan then they jump right into our system that we use primarily right now adobe captivate and they start building it so that let sergeant gunter continue to move on to the next block of tasks and by the time she's done with that we probably have her first module done and she can go look at that in my learning in the sandbox and verify the content is correct the images make sense our assessment items are correct we don't have weird uh distractible you know distractors on our tests that are just too obvious so it allows us to move much more quickly modernizing a course particularly these cdcs because they do have so many tasks associated um it can take six to 12 months depending on how those how many tasks there are to modernize the course initially but the beauty of the way that we're doing this and the documentation that we are doing is that once it is modernized the next time it needs to be updated we have all the documentation we have all of the tasks we have most of the content already built so all we have to do then is pull up the obsolete tasks and insert the new ones that shortens our cycle from you know two to three years and the old fc away to a matter of a couple weeks to a couple months depending on how many tasks have changed and that's a huge huge time saving and it is an amazing opportunity for us to get the updates out to the field when they need them especially when you consider there's life and safety issues sometimes that we have to address quickly two to three years we can't do that anymore we cannot wait for that we have to get this out fast so once we have designed it and our cdc writers have approved yet this stuff is good the course is good then we will pilot it do the test test group of students um do some quick analysis on that make sure that we're good and then i'll go live to the field and that in of itself is kind of the agile e-learning methodology that we're using to design developer courseware so i'll turn back to the cdc riders and i wanted to start with sergeant gunner how important is it uh in your mind uh having been in your career field for as long as you have and now uh in the cdc process to have this ability to put in things like interactive content and scenario based assessment things of that nature i feel that it's very important you know the old cdc's is black and white so it's mainly for the people who like to read we have different learning styles and so with the ability to still read if that's what they like to do we have people who like to play video games they need to see move a mouse around to connect you know one item to the next so having the different abilities to read play right and then check their progress i feel like is a way to connect all of our new millennials and airmen coming into the military to make sure that they are retaining the information that they need and not just trying to memorize everything so they're learning it they know they're going to use it in the field and it's interactive to keep them you know awake wanting to read more hopefully in order to finish one time and make sure they retain it and sergeant gray sergeant peterson i would think especially in a career field and a lot of obviously air force specialty codes are technical but you know i imagine vehicle maintenance there's a lot of the you know putting your hands on physical pieces and seeing how they kind of go together um so you can understand the inner workings of things how important is it to have this 3d modeling capability and these kinds of things in your design i think it's extremely important when the air force downsized and our taskings for deployments increased it left uh the trainers with very little amount of time to actual train airmen they're they were fixing vehicles uh we cut our budget so we have older vehicles in our fleet than what we probably used to have so they're always broken or they always need repairs so uh it is nice to be able to have interactive 3d models and it will be great because if there's a trainer that's not available but that airmen if they were to read something and then wonder how that actually works and they couldn't watch a video or couldn't see even just a 2d uh picture of something very clearly because in the old cdc's i think the pixels were you know a quarter pixel i don't even know if they were full pixels at the time for the images but it will be extremely nice because that airman will be able to see all that versus reading it and then going into the shop and asking their trainer to show them because they don't quite understand it in the automotive world things are constantly changing and certain peterson can talk on this a lot more than i can because he just got back from a training class for it but the potus's uh mission or vision right now is to have a lot of hybrid or fully electric vehicles in our government fleet so it's one concept that very little of our technicians know a lot about and we'll be able to quickly and and uh very agilely put these into our training and have videos on them um so it that's very great too and starting pleasanton it sounds like i mean not only is this useful for upgrade training but even if you just need some refresher training on a particular task after you already have your skill level this may not be a bad thing to go back and reference yeah absolutely um you know i think it'll be a great way um for for even the experienced folks to get in there and if nothing else to see what their airmen are learning that they're about to train and to understand the terminology that their airmen are going to be familiar with because you know the vehicle maintenance world um on the civilian side or on the military side there's a lot of terminal terminology that's a little bit fluid right so you know one company will use use a specific name for a part another company called something else but it has the same function um so if an airman comes out of the comes out of the office after doing their cdc training and they're calling they're calling this widget or what's it uh and their trainer you know calls that that widget or what's that um then there can be some confusion there right so the ability for the trainers to come back and refresh themselves on this material and and recognize the terminology that their airmen are going to be familiar with is to me that's really going to help the training go to the next level for those airmen um and then as sergeant grey was talking about the hybrid and electric vehicles you're absolutely right most of the folks in our shops have very little experience with those if any historically a lot of those those vehicles that we've had in our fleet have been have been gsa vehicles that we as vehicle maintenance don't don't really do anything with and there's only been a handful that are that are vehicles we're responsible for maintaining um you know if the if as the vision moves along uh to electrify more of the government vehicles um then certainly we're gonna need that training because uh on a typical automotive vehicle you're looking at 12 to 24 volts uh on the electrical system and on these hybrid vehicles you're looking at between 300 and 1000 volts so that's a that's a pretty significant difference and so it's going to be really important for us to get that type of training out to the airmen quickly and in a consistent way so that we can make sure that they're learning the appropriate safety standards across the air force rather than a piecemeal format that each shop has been forced to come up with on their own based on their own experiences and mrs fredman i really wanted to hit on a point that um we had talked about when we first met on on the phone and it was how you were actually going to focus as well on taking out maybe some things that airmen don't need taking out that extra content and then maybe proposing um you know more of an ojt afterwards for some of that content how is that process going yeah absolutely i love that so actually master sergeant gunter's course um i believe so her instructional designer mr frank rosenkrantz he actually um took what i believe was 40 pages in the cdc and of course we used uh that kind as a reference point and massaging gunter provided us excellent task analysis worksheets and as he developed that lesson those 40 pages from the old cdc turned into about 20 different screens in the new lesson and that is what we call cutting the fluff and that is how much excess information that was nice to know but didn't focus on the task it wasn't task critical and what we know is that when you were in a classroom setting it's very nice for the instructor to have the ability to add on some nice to know information and it kind of becomes very organic um but students know right off the bat that it's kind of it may apply to some but not to all and maybe this is testable maybe this this isn't right where should i focus in the online environment we need to cut some fluff because students time is limited attention spans are limited so we are looking and we are asking our cdc writers and all of whom have come through brilliantly to really look at it and what are the no kidding get back to basics here what is the information that this student absolutely must have and then at the end when as we develop our cdcs towards the end we're looking at after the courses have been built and we have the modules lined up and these are the tasks that are taught in each of these modules we're creating recommended ojt training plans on the job training plans um where as the student finishes module one these are the tasks they just learned so here are the on the job tasks that we recommend they immediately go and apply that information in the field and that is something that has been very missed is not a bridge that has been built historically with cdc's and in fact chief bite could certainly talk to that more um but we know historically that there are some um some organizations some groups that before once an airman arrives they say do your cdc don't touch anything until you finish it because that content is so obsolete that if we train you on the the correct way the current way to do this then you'll probably fail your test and that's really unacceptable and so what we're doing is we're building that bridge we're making it relevant timely current and accurate and bridging that with that ojt task to really cement that knowledge cement that learning and support the continuum of learning that our airmen deserve it's just really so great to really learn how the cdc's are becoming even more mission focused and obviously competency based and truly airmen centric which is the framework for force development uh in the air force but as we get close to wrapping up here i kind of wanted to turn back to uh the cdc riders and just kind of make a point that ms fredman had made in the article that that will publish with the podcast but you know not every career field is working with afcetta currently but uh sergeant gray i'll start with you if you could give that sita a 20-second commercial on why a career field should should call asida tomorrow and start working on their cdcs what would you say i would say that they are agile they are very accommodating to work with kind of openly however you want to work with design wise so if you're looking at designing something very interactive then they're going to work with you that way but if you want to design something that's very reader friendly and just have something that's online and easily accessible with a mobile device or a laptop then they can design that as well so they're extremely agile and they take the burden off of the the cdc writer of developing this stuff and basically turning us into smees where we're the expert and they're the ones taking on the burden of designing everything and really putting it all together to make something happen anything to add sergeant peterson i'll just i'll just say you know as is the the old cdc writer around here who was ready to divorce afsita uh i'm glad that we went to the marriage counseling and decided to stick with them because they're they're absolutely taking us in the direction we want to go um and uh so you know i understand there are some career fields that that maybe divorced have seen in the past and have some hesitancy to come back but i'll tell you that working with them has been great um it's a it's a very good relationship that we have especially with our iss and of course with miss redmond and and chief buy um and they they really listen to our concerns and where we want to go and they've even provided some suggestions for us uh that we hadn't really considered so um yeah i'm very happy with the direction fcd is going in and i'm actually kind of sad that i'll be leaving this position soon uh because i you know i would have really liked to see this all the way through to the end but i'm sure that the cdc riders that come in after after me are going to take us to the next level so i'm excited to see the product when it hits the streets and i'm back out in the field sergeant gunner i mean i don't have much else to add to what sergeant gray and sergeant peterson has already said outside of you know they are very flexible and open-minded so i am happy that we stayed you know married as well um because i feel like they have a good plan ahead um and you know we're on a timeline of getting that done i believe i will be able to see this all the way through i really hope i do um i'm just excited like i said earlier about where it's going but if other fscs have divorced um they're trying to on their own i would say you might want to find a way to get back into connection with afsita and so miss fredman chief obviously you have to be very excited about where your organization is heading but more importantly at the end of the day what you're doing for forced development in the air force oh my gosh i'm so excited and it's funny you know so sergeant peterson or actually maybe it was sergeant gray who mentioned you know we're probably bugging chief by so much you know when when it was pretty much down to a one-man uh operation during the transition you know and but i know like the when we first got our our staff and we were ready to start developing procedures and processes and we i i had kept track of you know the cdc writers who not have been bugging me the most but i've been in contact the most because they were very excited with what we had been telling and they were eager to get started and so so that includes um you know the three that we're talking to right now sergeant gunther sergeant gray and start peterson and then there's a handful of others that have their courses in production as well but you know i had been promising them for a long time i'm so glad they stuck it out to be honest i was making promises you know they say hope is not a strategy but i was still relying on a lot of hope but thank goodness the air force came through and and we got ms fredman as our director who came with so much experience um from her time you know in the in the industry um working with um in in schools in in the um working in army education training and then customs and border protection she brought so much of these processes and procedures that we had to adjust for air force but she brought that experience with her and then our staff of instructional systems specialists our education and training um specialists that are military members and then we have some education technicians we're we're still not 100 we're what 70 percent manned if not even that good yeah maybe around 50 60 man but anyway i was making a lot of promises i'm glad they stuck it through but thank goodness we've got this great team on board that is that is not making me look like a liar because i didn't know how it was going to happen i knew it could happen but i was scared but they have come through and they far exceeded my my expectations when i saw the first demo i think it was of saunters uh sergeant gunther's course and when mr rosencrantz showed us that first demo i'm not embarrassed to say i teared up i teared up when i saw that first demo of the online course that they're doing because because of this so important for our airmen and i'm really excited that we're finally being able to we're finally getting um getting ready to provide the career field managers and what they deserve in times of in terms of revision um agile updates and then our airmen the valuable training that they need that they can relate to so i'm i'm so thrilled i'm excited to be working with these cdc writers and the others but and i'm incredibly proud of our staff and thankful to ms fredman for for what she's brought to the table as well thanks chief did that make you was that awkward i'll tell you what you know friday um last friday chief and i had the extreme honor and privilege uh to brief simsaf chief bass um at the alistair force development panel we got an opportunity to share with her the good news of vasata's modernization um and quite frankly getting to that point happened very quickly um and so it's a little surreal to be there and it was great to get the thumbs up you know we're heading the right direction um she was very instrumental in helping get uh stata to the point that we're at especially under second air force and so that was great as great as that is though um honestly it's been an honor listening uh to our cdc writers today and just hearing kind of firsthand i know we don't always get to talk about it and of course when i i ask you but just hearing your experiences and that it's going as well as i had hoped and thought it was going it's really just an honor um we have three main stakeholders first one is the airmen who take our course we gotta deliver for them the second is the career field managers who are telling us what needs to be trained and what they need for their for their part of the force um and the third is cbc writers and right now i can only impact so many of those until we get these courses out but to know that our cdc writers feel um valued respected and heard members of our team um we're just glad you guys are part of the ascii a family and anyone who's left us we got plenty of room at the table come on back well i just want to say thanks to all of you for uh talking about this great modernization program that's really helping aetc transform the way airmen learn so thanks to all of you thank you thank you for the thank opportunity thank you thank you just a great conversation with the team from afsita as well as our cdc riders out in the field and lieutenant general webb he said it many times that airmen are a weapon system and our mission here in aetc is to develop them and really modernization a key component of doing just that and aetc transforming the way airmen learn continues and will continue to be a top priority for the command so big thank you to miss fredman chief by massan gray massart and gunner and matt sardon peterson for spending time with us today on the pod as a reminder you can follow air education and training command and the aetc command team via social media on facebook twitter and instagram you can also follow aetc on linkedin as well as well as the web on www.aetc.af dot mil thanks for checking out the podcast as we dive into the world of recruiting training and education for our entire aetc public affairs team i'm dan hawkins so long we'll talk to you next time on the air force starts here English (auto-generated) AllListenableRecently uploaded