Military Workforce Analytics

Abstract

As a consequence of the closed, hierarchical nature of military organizations, good planning is key to ensuring that a military workforce will be well-situated to meet future demands. This chapter explores the role of data-driven decision support (referred to as analytics) in military workforce planning. As an applied research field, analytics aims to provide actionable insights and practical solutions to questions posed by decision-makers. Since data underlie all analytics, this chapter touches on the challenges of data-related issues such as accessibility, integration, and completeness, highlighting the importance of understanding the data and the context around it. Next, several areas where analytics are used to solve military workforce planning problems are discussed. This will give the reader a sense of the breadth of the domain, as well as the various approaches that can be employed by a practitioner.