By Erika Fitzpatrick, Contributor
How can the U.S. Coast Guard get today’s young people interested in a career in the service? Which policies need to change to retain the recruited talent pool? How can the force maintain its core focus on search and rescue and law enforcement with a personnel shortage likely to persist?
These are among the challenges faced by the Coast Guard, which enters its fifth straight year of failing to meet recruiting goals by double-digit percentages.
“The crisis for us is real, just like the rest of the armed services,” Rear Admiral Russell Dash, Coast Guard Commander for the Personnel Service Center, said April 9 at Sea-Air-Space 2024. “We’re at the beginning of the crisis.”
Although leaving his position soon, Dash for two years has headed up the incident command established to solve the recruiting crisis. A key aim is growing the Coast Guard, which currently has close to 45,000 service members, the vast majority enlisted and the rest reservists. The service is short about 10% of its enlisted workforce, officials say.
Competition for Talent
Some historic forces have contributed to the crisis, Dash said. The population of high school graduates is shrinking, resulting in a smaller pool of talent from which to recruit. Sequestration-induced budget cuts closed many Coast Guard recruiting offices. The paper-based recruiting process is burdensome, and outdated human resources policies discourage enlistments and retention.
More can be done to make a Coast Guard career attractive to potential recruits and their families. Dash’s office is taking a three-pronged approach to address recruiting challenges.
One is to generate more leads. This means generating awareness of the USCG, building interest in these careers, and driving up enlistments. In other words, Dash said, “get more people interested in talking to Coast Guard recruiters.”
This takes creativity and innovation — and adopting good ideas from other branches. The Army, for instance, offers peer-referral recruitment bonuses, Dash said. The Coast Guard recently expanded that to build intergenerational career awareness by offering USCG retirees a $1,000 payment for every referral who enlists, he said.
“We’re in a competition for talent,” Dash said.
The Coast Guard is also expanding its Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program to all nine Coast Guard Districts by 2025. Dash said this aims to broaden students’ exposure to USCG careers and core values both in home districts and across the districts via JROTC competitions.
Next is to improve the overall recruitment process. Modernizing the recruitment process is another must, he said.
“Today, if a young American wants to enlist in the Coast Guard, we hand them a clipboard with 86 pieces of paper on it and they start filling that out,” Dash said, not entirely sarcastically. “You can imagine how well that goes over with this generation of young Americans.”
Dash said the summer rollout of a recruiting app should help make this process more user-friendly and appealing to recruiters’ target demographic.
Lastly is to increase capacity for recruitment. Dash said efforts in this area include opening new recruiting centers each year for the next three years.
“There’s a lot of work going on in recruiting today,” Dash said. “We’re doing better this year but it’s still going to be a challenge for us for years to come.”
Closely related to recruitment is retention of service members, another challenge that Coast Guard officials are working to overcome through more modernized talent management. Retention initiatives include:
· Allowing junior enlisted members to opt out of promotions and remain in service.
· Keeping service members engaged — and absorbing personnel shortfalls — by automating routine tasks.
· Expediting through high-tech skills training the advancement of enlisted personnel through the ranks.
Dash said Coast Guard officials are confident that a recently completed force realignment has mitigated the personnel shortage without damaging core search and rescue and law enforcement functions. But he acknowledged the true impact won’t be known for a few months.
“The reality will actually hit us this summer,” Dash said, “as people at units transfer out and there is not a person coming in to replace them.”