Yet another post about Army life at DINFOS.
Each Thursday at DINFOS the Army received mentorship training. This program adds a full hour of dull
PowerPoint presentations to a day that started at 0400. Like every other program here, we are
supposed to be awake and attentive. Yet
nearly all the information in mentorship
is for active duty Army.
A colonel who spoke to us said 35 minutes into a presentation that ran ten minutes overtime
that guard and reserve should go to sleep, this info is for active Army. Yet all MOS-Ts are required to be there to
listen to information that does not apply to them when they could be studying,
eating or resting.
In fairness, the mentorship program would not be as
painfully bad as it is if it were not combined with the 0400 PT Program. But it is.
Mentorship is the 13th hour in a day that is already too
long.
Whoever dreamed up this program probably thought it was a good thing. But that is how every failed product launch happens in the business world. Someone inside the company dreams up a new product or service then decides to sell it without asking real customers.
The real customers in this case want to do their homework, sleep, or just about anything rather than sit through another hour of PowerPoint.
If you need specifics, I wrote at length about mentorship
training here, I wrote about it last month.
The post is below.
Saturday, October 5,
2013
Another
Reason the Air Force Laughs at us: Thursday Mentorship Training
Among
the many ill-conceived programs we endure at school, the Thursday mentorship
program for Army soldiers is one of the dumbest.
Each
Thursday at 4:30 p.m. we gather in a conference room of the main school
building and listen to a one-hour lecture about what our job will be like out
in the field. At least, that is how the
lecture is billed.
In
reality, exactly one of the lectures had any real connection to our immediate
future in Army Public Affairs. But these
lectures do have an effect on our school experience.
They
are one more ill-conceived and unnecessary aggravation.
We
get up at 4 a.m. each morning to do PT (Physical Training) and have eight hours
of classes each day finishing at 4 p.m.
Adding a lecture that will not be graded at the end of a 12-hour day
would be nasty if it were interesting.
But these lectures are farther off topic than cold-weather survival
training in Mogadishu, Somalia.
With
one exception, these lectures are far above our pay grade, and focused on
active-duty Army. The majority of the
soldiers in these classes are enlisted and junior NCOs in the National Guard
and Reserve.
Four
weeks ago, a Sergeant First Class talked to us for 73 minutes about the
distribution of Public Affairs leadership slots in the active Army. His focus was on officers and senior NCOs. And he droned on 13 minutes over his hour in
front of people who had already spent a whole day in class.
Two
weeks ago, a Master Sergeant spoke for his entire hour about creating
PowerPoint slides for command briefings.
He is a perfect example of the kind of speaker that drives speechwriters
crazy: he thinks he is funny, and he is
not. Worse still, he thinks he is funny
when he is just being himself. He said
toward the end of the hour, “I know this stuff is dry, but at least I am
entertaining right?”
He
got a mildly affirmative answer, but what else could he get. He has power over his audience and was using
it to make himself feel good.
To
be fair, there was one useful mentoring hour.
It lasted just 45 minutes. A
Staff Sergeant who works on the Army’s social media program talked to us about
how the Army is currently using social media and where the program is headed.
That
talk was useful. We got one ungraded day
in our entire three-month school program about social media, and most of us
will return to units who have or need Facebook page administrators.
By
the end of school we will have had 12 hours of mentorship, 12 hours mostly
spent trying to stay awake listening to irrelevant information.
Army
Strong!
