Joint Professional Military Education: The Impact of Broadened Learning on Medical Staff Officers

Abstract

Joint Professional Military Education, Phase I (JPME-I) is an underutilized educational opportunity among the Navy’s medical staff officers at a time of increasing jointness and complexity in the delivery of healthcare across the Military Health System. I employ a quantitative multivariate approach using individual-level personnel data from the Navy’s Officer Personnel Information System (OPINS) to study the 2001–2005 cohorts of Navy medical staff corps personnel to ascertain the relationship between JPME-I completion and an officer’s probability of promotion to O-4 and O-5. I find that the completion of JPME-I, by itself, has no significant predictive power on the probability of promotion but that JPME-I completion in combination with two other courses of professionally broadening education does predict higher likelihood of selection for promotion to both O-4 and O-5. Recent changes in the delivery of the JPME-I curriculum improve the convenience and efficiency for officers who choose to pursue this enriching course of study. Senior medical staff corps officers can enhance their subordinates’ professional development when they encourage the completion of JPME-I as part of a learning strategy that integrates a broad range of educational experiences.