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Higher education faces many of the same challenges as the Air Force's technical training enterprise; some practices from higher education possibly hold promise for the Air Force

• Higher education institutions have advantages over AETC in terms of planning for and providing education, specifically their ability to rapidly flex when demands change and to more readily adopt new methods of planning and instruction.
• Higher education institutions can take advantage of outside expertise by outsourcing parts of their registrar functions and can quickly adopt the latest technological advances to enhance the training and planning processes.
• Although differences exist between colleges and universities and the Air Force's training mission, AETC may benefit from adopting or adapting some of the practices currently being employed in postsecondary education.

The analogy between commercial supply chains and the "production" of trained airmen is imperfect

• The Air Force's nonrated technical training process can be seen as two supply chains that have different underlying production systems: a supply chain for creating instructors and a supply chain for creating trained airmen.
• Many supply chain management principles have direct application to managing technical training, particularly those pertaining to resourcing strategies.

A flexible instructor pool is a new approach to instructor resourcing that would enable AETC to quickly react to changing student requirements

• Such a pool would draw on a mix of active duty, reserve component, civilians, contractors, and adjunct instructors⁠—options that could be used alone or in combinations to expand instructor capacity, as needed to respond to changes in demand.

In fiscal year 2016, RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF) conducted a study for the Air Force Air Education and Training Command (AETC) of inefficiencies in the nonrated technical training pipeline. The goal of this research was to identify ways to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the Air Force's technical training enterprise for both officers and enlisted personnel. That study identified many opportunities to improve the technical training planning process, resource allocation process, and the flow of students through the technical training pipeline.

As a follow-on to that effort, AETC asked PAF to look outside the Air Force for insights and best practices upon which they could draw. AETC identified three particular topics of interest: (1) how colleges and universities right-size their instructor corps in the face of fluctuations in enrollments and demands for coursework, (2) best practices associated with supply chain management, and (3) approaches for developing a flexible instructor pool.

At the conclusion of their research, the authors identified common threads that emerged from what might appear to be rather disparate topics. One is the realization that there is no one-size-fits-all model that will work AETC-wide to achieve more-efficient operations. Instead, these concepts and the resource decisions that they drive are best applied to the individual training pipelines for each Air Force specialty. The second thread is that flexibility across the training pipeline is the key to improving planning and resource efficiency.

• Chapter One

  Improving Efficiency in the Air Force Nonrated Technical Training Pipeline

• Chapter Two

  Introduction and Overview of American Community Colleges

• Chapter Three

  Outsourcing and Automating Services Ancillary to the Core Mission

• Chapter Four

  Anticipating Changes in Workforce Demand

• Chapter Five

  Adjusting Capacity in Response to Changes in Demand

• Chapter Six

  Alternative Methods for Instructional Delivery

• Chapter Seven

  Conclusion

• Chapter Eight

  Introduction

• Chapter Nine

  Parallels Between the Nonrated Technical Training Process

• Chapter Ten

  Resourcing Approaches to Supply Chain and Production Systems

• Chapter Eleven

  A Proposed Process for Choosing Resourcing Strategies

• Chapter Twelve

  Summary and Recommendations

• Chapter Thirteen

  The Case for Building a Flexible Instructor Approach

• Chapter Fourteen

  Instructor Pool Elements

• Chapter Fifteen

  Instructor Suitability Evaluation

• Chapter Sixteen

  The Benefits of Flexibility for Improving Technical Training Efficiency

• Chapter Seventeen

  Where Should the Air Force Go from Here?

• Appendix A

  Statistics of Air Force Special Code Program Guidance Letter Changes

• Appendix B

  Officer Air Force Specialty Code Program Guidance Letter Changes