Costs and Benefits of Training and Experience

Performance Measures for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Maintenance Training

“…Using Navy Casualty Reports (CASREPs) as their data source, Horowitz and Sherman (1977) reported that ships experience fewer major equipment problems when more experienced personnel are aboard. In another study, Horowitz and Angier (1985) reported several relationships between operational measures and the training and experience of the maintenance personnel. First, the fraction of surface combatant ships with no serious mission-degrading equipment failures (0/PI/JPI) between 1977 and 1983 varied as a function of the ratio of the number of junior (E-1 to E-4) personnel to the number of authorized billets and the ratio of senior (E-5 to E-9) personnel to the number of billets.…”

“…Horowitz and Angier (1985) analyzed A-7 sortie data (O/PI/JPI) and found a positive relation between experience in terms of pay grade and the number of sorties per quarter. In reviewing the Casualty Reports (O/PI/JPI) for 91 ships over a three-year period, they found that experience and training are the most consistent predictors of readiness.…”

Between Science and Engineering: Reflections on the APSA Presidential Task Force on Political Science, Electoral Rules, and Democratic Governance

“…For example, salient social divisions (racial, ethnic, or religious) may breed intense partisan attachments, particularly if voters see the party as an extension of their group. 22 Perhaps for this reason, socially diverse countries produce larger party systems, even under FPTP rules. 23 Widespread strategic behavior consistent with the Mϩ1 rule will also be unlikely where information is lacking about which candidates are in or out of the running.…”

Finding the Balance Between Schoolhouse and On-the-Job Training

“…One particularly interesting finding from this study was that supervisors tended to rate their own trainees higher than the average trainee, indicating that using the "average trainee" values from a similar estimate might produce a downwardly biased estimate of actual OJT training costs. Horowitz and Angier (1985) used an econometric time series regression technique to measure the relationship between experience (measured by rank, years of service, prior sea experience, and quantity of training) and productivity (measured by the amount of mission-degrading downtime suffered by the maintained equipment) for individuals in six Navy maintenance career fields. Although their techniques were not designed to demonstrate causal relationships between any of the experience variables and productivity, their analysis did indicate significant correlation between quantity of formal training and productivity in five of the six career fields in the study.…”