Pentagon Moves to Unify Workforce Training Records

The War Department is moving to a unified learning management system to eliminate duplicative platforms and create a single training record for personnel.

Project eLMS aims to consolidate more than 31 learning management systems (LMS) into a unified platform to streamline training, reduce duplicative spend and create a single training record that follows personnel throughout their careers.

“Our goal also with this platform is to have you log into one place and you see your entire training record, whether you took it in this LMS or not,” said Sarah Nather, deputy director of DOW’s IT Portfolio Management Office, at TechNet Indo-Pacific Tuesday.

The consolidation follows a defense comprehensive review launched last June that identified more than 31 learning management systems across the department, representing approximately $659 million in spending.

The review also found workforce readiness challenges stemming from fragmented training systems. DOW’s cyber workforce officials, for example, were manually tracking more than 14,000 training records using spreadsheets.

“We said, how can we make this more efficient and effective for our department?” Nather said. “Not only to deliver the efficiencies … from a financial standpoint, but also how does it impact total force readiness, and then also how does it impact our cyber footprint?”

Training Consolidation Efforts

Following direction from DOW CIO Kirsten Davies and other department leaders, DOW established a joint tiger team between the Office of the CIO and Personnel and Readiness in May to identify enterprise training requirements.

“This project has moved at what I would call light speed for the department,” Nather said. “Davies gave us the challenge to move faster and told us you got to do this in 90 days. … We got the tiger team to establish enterprise requirements in less than two weeks after standing up.”

The team identified approximately 350 requirements across the department, determining that an existing learning platform with 1.2 million DOW users operated by the former Defense Acquisition University, now called WarU, could meet most needs with approximately 15 additional requirements.

“Our target, you’ll see on our roadmap, is to have most of the department already onboarding in early January,” Nather said. “We shifted the schedule forward two years by doing that. Originally, our plan was to do that in 2028.”

What’s Next?

The department is also exploring AI-powered training recommendations that could identify career development opportunities based on employees’ completed courses and qualifications.

“There’s some pretty cool things with that. … It will look at the various training that you’re taking and say, ‘Hey, you’ve taken all these classes. While you might be qualified for this work role, because you’ve taken this other stuff, maybe extracurricularly or something that you’re interested in, you might want to consider these other roles.’” she said. “It kind of helps you develop not only for what your qualifications are, but also beyond what you might be interested in as an employee.”

Nather said officials have discussed with the Office of Personnel Management how training records could eventually follow personnel into civilian positions across government.

“We can send that record out to them and say, here’s the full record going back through their military history,” Nather said.

DOW is preparing a memo formally establishing the enterprise platform and outlining migration requirements and exceptions.

“We are currently staffing a memo that will kind of codify all these decisions and send out across the department. That will be jointly signed again by CIO and Personnel and Readiness. … That’s forthcoming. I anticipate you will probably see that in the next month or two.”