Interactive Learning Environments To Address Department of Navy Acquisition Workforce Issues

Abstract

The Department of the Navy (DoN) acquisition workforce includes many diverse parts, processes, and stakeholders that interact over time in a wide variety of ways. Understanding the interactions among workforce components is critical to developing improved policies. Developing that understanding is not intuitive or obvious, largely because the workforce and its performance are dynamic, i.e., they evolve in response to system structure, current conditions, and current and future policies. Improving policy maker and acquisition workforce understanding and developing effective and efficient policies requires tools and methods that can capture the systemic, dynamic feedback in the system, current and future policies, and can reflect their impacts on workforce performance. The current research developed an interactive learning environment (ILE) of a Navy Acquisition Workforce (NAW) issue. A formal system dynamics simulation model is the core of the ILE. The prototype illustrates some of the capabilities of an ILE for addressing NAW issues.