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What secrets lurk in the filecards?
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06-02-2011, 01:06 PM
zuludelta
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
Quote:
Originally Posted by
lardman
Also, can one not be promoted due to experience and skill outside of the armed forces or does this not happen?
As Loose Cannon alluded to, currently, there are programs in place in the Army and Navy where a bachelor's degree from an accredited college/university or significant technical/practical experience in a relevant career field (i.e., law enforcement, network administration, etc.) will allow a new recruit to enter the service at the pay-grade of E-4 as soon as they complete basic training. They'll still need to meet the minimum time-in-grade and time-in-service requirements before becoming eligible for a pay-grade promotion to E-5, though.
But back in the 1960s and 1970s and the early 1980s, certain Army recruits could come in directly in pay-grades as high as E-6 after completing basic. This was because for certain occupational specialties (not the infantry though, IIRC) , there used to be a parallel "specialist" enlisted structure that was equivalent in pay, but not authority, to the NCO enlisted structure.
For example, an experienced truck mechanic who had joined the Army to become a wheeled vehicle mechanic had two career track options open to him upon graduating basic: (1) he could either go the specialist route, where his civilian experience could possibly allow him to skip the E-2, E-3, and even E-4 and E-5 pay-grades directly into the E-6 pay-grade; or (2) he could choose the NCO route, where he would have to start at E-2, and work his way up the ranks the conventional way (by earning promotion points and accumulating time-in-service and time-in-grade).
While the pay was equivalent, the specialist community and NCO community had differences in their authority. A soldier with the rank of Specialist 4 (a specialist in the pay-grade of E-4) had the same pay as a Corporal (a junior NCO in the pay-grade of E-4) but the latter, being an NCO, nominally outranked the former. Specialists only had authority over lower-ranked specialists and enlisted personnel in the pay-grades of E-1 to E-3. Thus, a Corporal technically outranked even a Specialist 6 (a specialist in the pay-grade of E-6). I suppose by way of analogy, the old specialist community was sort of the enlisted equivalent of today's warrant officer community (in that certain warrant officer ranks are roughly in the same salary bracket as some commissioned officer ranks, but do not share the same command authority powers except in certain situations, i.e., in the Special Forces and SEAL communities).
There was very little, if any, crossover between the specialist and NCO communities. A Specialist 4 could only be promoted to Specialist 5 and not Sergeant (the NCO equivalent in terms of pay-grade) and a Sergeant could only be promoted to Staff Sergeant and not Specialist 6 (the specialist equivalent of the E-6 NCO rank). Of course, there have been exceptions.
The parallel specialist structure was abolished by the Army in the mid-1980s (for various reasons), although they retained the lowest specialist rank (Specialist 4), which is known simply as "specialist" today and can still serve as the "entry rank" for bachelor's degree holders and certain experienced civilian professionals joining the enlisted Army community, although just as it was in previous decades, a corporal still nominally outranks a specialist despite being in the same pay-grade. The major difference now of course is that a specialist can be promoted to sergeant (some even get "laterally promoted" to corporal before making sergeant) and proceed down the NCO career route, once they fulfill the appropriate requirements.
Civilian education still does contribute to promotion in the enlisted ranks, even though the specialist ranks (with the exception of the lowest specialist rank) have long since disappeared. IIRC, every semester hour completed by a soldier or sailor studying at an accredited college or university is equivalent to 1.5 promotion points, which would give him a leg up in terms of rank advancement over his peers who don't go to school part-time while in the service.
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Last edited by zuludelta; 06-02-2011 at
01:18 PM
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