Unfortunately, the culture has not caught up with the policies. Changes to the retirement system, expanded child care, improved parental leave policies, career intermission, and geographic stabilization are all important steps in the right direction. In recognition of changing norms, the DoD has begun in recent years to implement policies that are more supportive of dual-professional couples. In a male-dominated culture, this should hardly be a contentious statement, but it is an important one: the military’s attitude toward women in the workplace is inherently tied to its understanding of dual-professional couples.
(To save time, see here for a good argument for why allowances-including those modified for dependents-should be viewed as part of a total compensation package.) Finally, though difficult to prove without a targeted study, across the services there is a cultural expectation that in dual-professional, heterosexual couples the female spouse’s career will be secondary.
#Career intermission program army professional#
Service members receive additional compensation for having a spouse or child (regardless of the spouse’s professional status), while recurring initiatives have attempted to strip dual-military couples of the same compensation as a cost-saving measure. Moreover, there are significant financial implications to support this line of thinking. The most fundamental manifestation of this problem is that non-military spouses are officially termed “ dependents,” which provides an obvious indication of the military’s expectations of a military spouse’s role. One might easily reach this flawed conclusion because the military culture reinforces an outdated social model in which the single-earner household is the norm. It would, however, be a mistake to think this an inevitable sacrifice that comes with military service. Couples who desire to maintain two competitive careers have far more options to do so outside the military. (This is particularly true of the Army after the base realignment and closures (BRAC) of the 1990s, which closed the likes of Fort Dix, New Jersey Fort Devens, Massachusetts and Fort Ord, California.) The effect of these structural challenges is that military spouses are unemployed at higher rates and earn less than their civilian counterparts.
#Career intermission program army portable#
Finally, even for those with a portable career, assignment options present significant geographic limitations, with few options near the country’s urban centers that are home to the country’s major corporations and universities.
There is no institutional consideration given to a spouse’s career, while frequent assignment changes present significant challenges to progression in all but the most portable careers. For dual-professional couples with only one service member the situation is worse. However, co-location is the only stated assignment consideration, and dual-military couples must often choose between co-location and a competitive assignment. For same-service, dual-military couples, the services have had no choice but to build systems that identify and support co-location of these service members. Unfortunately, this discussion is lacking within the DoD, and the military is structurally and culturally unprepared to accommodate dual-career couples who increasingly prioritize shared career success.įirst, the military’s assignment system presents structural impediments to supporting the careers of dual-professional couples. Unsurprisingly, the most significant implication of this change is that millennials approach career and family choices differently than previous generations, and there is growing discussion in journalism, academia, and the private sector about how organizations can adapt to meet these generational changes. This generational trait is a significant departure from baby boomers-who constitute much of the senior leadership of the military-of whom only 47 percent are in a dual-professional relationship.
The problem is simple: 78 percent of the millennial workforce is in a dual-professional relationship, and it is reasonable to assume that the trend will increase with subsequent generations.
While seemingly exhaustive, this discourse has largely overlooked a profound generational shift: the sharp increase of dual-professional couples. Talent management in the Department of Defense has received a great deal of critical attention over the last few years, but much of this thinking has centered on how the military’s structure, culture, and incentives drive individual retention.
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