The Transformation Team is developing an Officer Profile (OP) system to enable officer career management and force planning. A searchable database of officers’ skills, qualifications, and interests, the OP will enable the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service (Corps) to identify candidates for jobs, deployments, training, and special duties. Because the OP will capture a wide array of skills, the system is expected to expand the awareness of opportunities available to each officer. Officers will be able to execute searches of a vacancy database that will create matches to their personal listed profiles. Finally, it will give force planners a glimpse into the capabilities of the Corps as a whole, and enable them to identify skill gaps that may be remedied through additional training or recruitment. Information stored in the OP will be encrypted, restricted to authorized users, and comply with Federal and Departmental security and privacy requirements.

The OP will feature two new types of information about officers:

• Preferences – Officer’s goals for agency and program assignments, job titles, training opportunities, geographic location, and more. Additionally, officers will be asked to indicate the timing for their preferences. For example, an officer may report that within the next 5 years, they would like to start working at the Food and Drug Administration in Boston, MA, as a Consumer Safety Officer (billet grade O-6).
• Attributes – A wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) relevant to the professions and disciplines of the Corps. This section will also include cross-cutting skill sets such as emergency preparedness and response, officership, foreign languages, human resources administration, grants management, health administration, information technology, and teaching. Finally, this section will include education and training (professional, agency-organized, and Corps-organized) that the officer has undertaken while in service.

The OP will improve the quality and quantity of information available to authorized users—it will not duplicate what is already available. Existing Corps data which serve the purpose established for the OP—core administrative information gathered during the call-to-duty and other personnel actions—will be transferred into the new system. Note that the OP does not replace essential IT systems that process pay and personnel actions and that the electronic Official Personnel Folder (eOPF) will remain as the repository of documents for record.

Capabilities envisioned for the OP, to be addressed in various stages of its creation, include: 

• For Corps Career Assignment Managers (CAMs) and agency hiring officials, ability to search the KSA and qualifications of all officers in the Corps
• A career reporting tool that will allow officers to view their accomplishments relative to the benchmarks of their category, and/or functional group and trace their progress along their career path.
• A streamlined version of the curriculum vita (CV) that is created by the system. Future versions of the OP will have the capability of producing a standard (printable) CV in numerous formats.
• A job-matching tool, through which the OP can report an officer’s qualifications for particular positions or an officer can search for position matches to his/her personal profile.

Envisioned users of the OP will include not only CAMs but officers, deployment managers in the Office of Force Readiness and Deployment (OFRD), agency hiring officials, and other career mentors. The nature of access granted to each type of user—the information available, the form in which it is presented, and modification/editing rights—will be governed by the user’s administratively assigned role.

With contractor support, the Transformation Team is identifying the data fields that will comprise the OP. The next stage will focus on developing data collection and job application tools, and establishing procedures and policies for their use. In the final stage of development, the OP will be created and integrated with the broader information technology system supporting Corps management and operations.

In early 2008, the Office of Commissioned Corps Operations (OCCO) will administer Web-based surveys requesting each officer to complete their OP. Officers will be automatically prompted to update their OP on a periodic basis. By creating and maintaining the OP, each officer will insure that his/her CAM is provided with critical information required to assist the officer with career management and progression services. Hiring officials will receive a panel of qualified officers who could fill their vacancies rapidly (more rapidly that through the civilian Human Resource system). OFRD will insure that officers with the appropriate skill sets are deployed to the right place at the right time to more effectively meet our response roles. Most importantly, the OP will empower each of our officers. You will be contributing directly to your own career progression and facilitating the work of CAMs on your behalf.