Determinants of Navy Promotions: Identifying and Understanding the Potential Predictors for Promotion within the Navy Medical Service Corps

Abstract

The Navy Medical Service Corps uses sub-specialty career roadmaps to communicate expectations and opportunities to all officers. All the roadmaps share a common theme: billet diversity across three groupings: Military Treatment Facility, Operational, and Staff duty. This study measures the benefits of duty-billet diversification, as encouraged in the roadmaps, by estimating the effects of career paths taken by officers in the three major specialty groups within the Medical Service Corps: Healthcare Administrators, Healthcare Clinicians, and Healthcare Scientists. Using a linear probability model to estimate promotion probabilities, I find that the effects of duty-billet diversity vary among each specialty grouping. Healthcare Administrators can improve their promotion probabilities by focusing on Military Treatment Facilities and Staff billets. Healthcare Scientists could enhance their promotion probabilities by concentrating on Staff billets. Healthcare Clinicians are the only track that shows benefits from holding billets in all three categories. The only commonality among all three groups is the significant benefit to promotion probability when serving in an Executive Medicine billet.