A systems engineering approach to address human capital management issues in the shipbuilding industry

摘要

Recent human capital trends within the Department of Defense (DoD) and its contractors have shown a dramatic decrease in science and engineering skill levels due to retirement and attrition. This has caused major concern for leaders, especially regarding engineering talent necessary for shipbuilding. This study investigated current DoD Human Capital Management (HCM) strategies for attracting, developing, retaining and managing competencies and intellectual resources for science and engineering talent within the shipbuilding industry. The investigation consisted of a survey of current DoD and industry HCM frameworks, an analysis of the needs of key stakeholders, and an examination of the gaps in the HCM strategies employed by these stakeholders. The result of the analysis was the development, via a functional analysis, of a notional HCM architecture for the shipbuilding industry that addresses stakeholder needs and closes the perceived gaps in current strategies. The notional HCM architecture was developed to provide a first iteration of a HCM architecture tailorable to a particular stakeholder's HCM needs. This study also developed a notional overall measure of effectiveness (OMOE) model to suggest the means by which stakeholders can judge the effectiveness of their tailored version of the HCM architecture. This first-iterate OMOE was derived using weights and metrics based on the author's insights gained from the research performed during this study, and suggests that further refinement of the HCM architecture is required.