• Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?

    Go here:

    Edit Account Details and Profile

Designator Advice

Pags

N/A
pilot
We really do a shitty job in educating people on the mechanics of the Navy and Officer Recruiters are only incentivized to get people into slots to fill their quotas.

These said, it would really behoove you and anyone else interested in Navy Officer programs to read as much as possible to understand what you are seeking to accomplish. If you can master and understand this stuff, you will be well ahead of pretty much every one of your peers.
  • Promotion Board. An IP colleague of mine is the hands down expert on promotion boards. She gives this brief every year to all JO's on how promotion boards work and tie in all this stuff. It is here.
  • Program Authorizations. Gives everyone an idea of what the Navy considers competitive at this moment in time. They are all here.
  • Community Briefs. These are per FY for each selection board and are approved by the Secretary of the Navy for Active Duty officer communities. They are here.
  • Community Health Brief (a/k/a drum beats). Probably the most valuable information you can read for each designator. Gives you a pulse on current gains and losses for the community (i.e., inventory of bodies taken from data from NOPPS and OAIS; See below), as well as historical. IMHO, I think these are valuable because if a community is healthy and well-manned or projected to be well-manned in a given year looking forward, the Navy will be less likely to entertain waivers or to lower standards to get more people into the community. Vice-versa if the community is not well-manned or projected to be not well-manned. Unfortunately, some communities' health briefs are easier to find than others, and are buried in each communities' PERS page. I've linked HR's directly so you can get an idea of what the brief contains: HR. Here is Where you want to go: Navy Personnel Command > Officer > Officer Detailing

View attachment 20646

Here is an example of the HR gains and losses. OPA is Officer Program Authorization, which I liked to above. You can see in the chart at the top right corner the current inventory by rank, the OPA from the previous two FY's. The follow on slides in their brief go on to tell you about manning and how to plug the holes.

View attachment 20647
Holy crap, how is any of this relevant to someone off the street?

OP: when you imagine yourself being in the Navy, what do you see? Standing on the bridge wing of a DDG giving orders to the helm, looking through a periscope or running a nuclear reactor, landing an airplane on a boat at night? Or sitting in some dark room behind a vault door making ppt slides? Or sitting at a computer ordering left handed smoke shifters, FFV, pallets of soda, and flight line? Do you want Top Gun or Office Space (maybe on a boat)? Start there and don't worry about things like command at sea or any of this minutia that you will someday understand but is of zero consequence.

Navy, it's not just a job. It's a job on a boat.
 

bubblehead

Registered Member
Contributor
Holy crap, how is any of this relevant to someone off the street?
Because it helps people off the street determine how competitive they are for certain designators based on their degree, GPA's and other qualifications vis-a-vis the demand signal from the Navy, the Program Authorization, and the pool of applicants.

These are from the Program Authorization for Cryptologic Warfare:

Screen Shot 2019-01-04 at 14.19.02.jpg

Screen Shot 2019-01-04 at 14.22.17.jpg

Screen Shot 2019-01-04 at 14.22.53.jpg

OP has a degree in Agricultural Leadership & Development and a 3.05 GPA. How competitive do you think they are for the CW program?

Check out the Program Authorization for SWO, for example: 2.8 GPA and a degree in whatever you want. Which do you think the OP has a better chance at from a commissioning standpoint?

IMHO, words like "strongly desired," "preferred," and "strongly preferred" are baseline requirements and are worded as such to give the Navy the latitude to recruit people -- with no waivers -- when there are otherwise no other qualified candidates or, perhaps, if there is a diversity candidate.
 
Last edited:

Pags

N/A
pilot
Because it helps people off the street determine how competitive they are for certain designators based on their degree, GPA's and other qualifications vis-a-vis the demand signal from the Navy, the Program Authorization, and the pool of applicants.

These are from the Program Authorization for Cryptologic Warfare:

View attachment 20648

View attachment 20649

View attachment 20650

OP has a degree in Agricultural Leadership & Development and a 3.05 GPA. How competitive do you think they are for the CW program?

Check out the Program Authorization for SWO, for example: 2.8 GPA and a degree in whatever you want. Which do you think the OP has a better chance at from a commissioning standpoint?

IMHO, words like "strongly desired," "preferred," and "strongly preferred" are baseline requirements and are worded as such to give the Navy the latitude to recruit people -- with no waivers -- when there are otherwise no other qualified candidates or, perhaps, if there is a diversity candidate.
As @RUFiO181 has mentioned, OP'S recruiter should provide that service. The docs and links you provided, while useful to the trained eye, are basically unintelligible to the layman. Other than being a pretty graph for NPC types the linked chart likely means nothing to someone who doesn't even get the basics of the Navy.

A lot of y'all are nuking this with deeply technical minutia that while likely accurate doesn't help a neophyte decide what they want to be in the Navy.
 

bubblehead

Registered Member
Contributor
A lot of y'all are nuking this with deeply technical minutia that while likely accurate doesn't help a neophyte decide what they want to be in the Navy.
I disagree.

People spend much more time and research on potential employers in the civilian world. This stuff is no different.
 

Hillbilly Gargoyle

Leisure Suit model and aspiring mariachi bassist
Take a breath, Sandcrab... If you're still at A&M (?), please drop by the NROTC office (I think it's called the "TRIGON") and set up a visit with one of the Naval Science instructors. Introduce yourself and get to the point. They try to maintain a diverse crowd on staff (URL, RL, CPO, retired), have former enlisted Sailors and Marines pursuing their commission (so there's a decent dose of experience around), and not really selling anything (or making recruiting quotas).

Concur with the other comments. The military (or anyone that I know) doesn't "owe" us a job... How will you be an asset to national defense? Think and write down what you want to accomplish, and where you would like to be in 10/15/20/30 years. There's pretty good odds that there is path to that vision as long as you are providing exceptional value to the military, preforming very well, and operating within policy & guidance (I could add "being innovative," but that's not a hard point in all designators). A commission implies leadership 1st/foremost, regardless of designator.

BTW, (respectfully) earning a Master's Degree is not an end state - it's an admin qual to do something.

Good luck!
 

Sandcrab01

New Member
Take a breath, Sandcrab... If you're still at A&M (?), please drop by the NROTC office (I think it's called the "TRIGON") and set up a visit with one of the Naval Science instructors. Introduce yourself and get to the point. They try to maintain a diverse crowd on staff (URL, RL, CPO, retired), have former enlisted Sailors and Marines pursuing their commission (so there's a decent dose of experience around), and not really selling anything (or making recruiting quotas).

Concur with the other comments. The military (or anyone that I know) doesn't "owe" us a job... How will you be an asset to national defense? Think and write down what you want to accomplish, and where you would like to be in 10/15/20/30 years. There's pretty good odds that there is path to that vision as long as you are providing exceptional value to the military, preforming very well, and operating within policy & guidance (I could add "being innovative," but that's not a hard point in all designators). A commission implies leadership 1st/foremost, regardless of designator.

BTW, (respectfully) earning a Master's Degree is not an end state - it's an admin qual to do something.

Good luck!

Howdy!

I graduated from A&M last may. Are you an Aggie as well?

If I am in town soon I will definitely drop by there for some advice. Hopefully, with the information they offer me I can learn more about the process since I am freshly new to this.

Also, thank you very much for the advice, it gives me a lot of thinking to do and questions I need to answer before moving on in the process.

I do believe I can prove to the Navy that I will be an asset continuously, even with a haunting GPA.
 

BigIron

Remotely piloted
pilot
Super Moderator
Contributor
That is crucial information. Thank you very much. I can focus on other designators now.
I had several straight stick AMDOs right out of OCS in my command who weren’t prior enlisted. I preferred prior enlisted maintenance managers as they produced results as ENS and Jgs.
 

BigIron

Remotely piloted
pilot
Super Moderator
Contributor
Last time in a squadron 2-3 years ago were the ENS types. I currently work with several O5-O6 non-prior AMDOs.
 
Top