Have you seen the draft of the revised NCOER? What are your thoughts?

SFC(P) Private RallyPoint Member — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 21:33:05 -0400

I recently received a draft version of the new NCOER and have some questions for those who may be involved in the development process. First I think it is a great step in the right direction to reduce ambiguous evaluations.

So the proposed system call for three different evaluations depending on your rank. The rating criteria is based off of leader competencies and characteristics as defined in ADP 6-22. The three rank categories are SGT, SSG-MSG, SGM-CSM. The categories for rating are leads, develops, achieves, intellect, and presence.

Significant changes:

Senior rater: Rates all Soldiers that he/she is currently rating against each other into four categories, Most Qualified, Extremely Qualified, Qualified, Not Qualified. The catch, only 49% of the total Soldiers in the same rate can be marked as most qualified. Finally no longer will 80% of the force be evaluated as 1/1. Every rating will have a history of all past ratings and show how many you had in each of the four categories (i.e. 2 Most Qualified, 4 Extremely Qualified etc.).

Sergeant: No more excellent blocks, only two options for the rater are met the standard or did not meet the standard. I assume this is because the next promotion does not require a centralized board. That gives the leadership a quick look at what you have done and if you are ready to stand in front of the CSM and shoot for SSG.

I think establishing an ambitious support form and rating based of what was achieved should be the standard army wide. They should be tracked by all in the rating scheme to ensure legitimacy when ranking your personnel to eliminate bias. My only question is how do you compare fairly someone you have rated for 90 days to someone you rated for a year?

What are your thoughts? If you have not seen the drafts and the brief I will be happy to send them your way if you want.

Response by LTC Hillary Luton made Oct 11 at 2014 6:02 PM

LTC Hillary Luton — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 18:02:51 -0400

SFC(P) Private RallyPoint Member I will be honest, I have not seen the NCOER, but the new OER leaves a lot to be desired. Quite frankly I cannot see how it will improve the officer evaluation system as it seems to be a lot of fluff and very little quantitative information on what effort an officer may or may not have actually put into a job. I know character is important, but if an officer shows up to work every day ready to tackle the mission, works hard, puts in extra time when its needed and gives me 150%, I know he has character. But the reality is, I don't care what the military does with their evaluation systems, as long we have supervisors who do not take a vested interest in teaching, coaching, mentoring their subordinates, the evaluation system will never make a difference.

Response by SGT Richard H. made Oct 17 at 2014 2:31 PM

SGT Richard H. — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 14:31:54 -0400

I don't like the rating scheme for SGT. essentially that means that for a guy who is just barely scraping by, but meets the standards, gets the same rating as a guy who busts his butt to go above and beyond and as such has an equal opportunity to make SSG.

Not right.

Response by 1LT Private RallyPoint Member made Oct 17 at 2014 5:04 PM

1LT Private RallyPoint Member — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 17:04:03 -0400

I admit I haven't seen the new NCOER, but I'm not sure how I feel about being compared against all NCO's of my rank. After all, is my NCOER an evaluation and reflection on me? Or is it a tool for my senior rater to reflect on his entire team and someone else's rating directly affects my rating? (For example, even if I'm a great Squad Leader who would get several "exceeds the std", but my battle buddy does just slightly better on his NCOER, my rating suffers because only one of us can have the better rating).

Things that bothered me more about NCOERs were some of the "mandatory" bullets senior leadership would expect - for example "every Leadership should have a Sexual Harassment bullet" or a "mandatory EO bullet". They take away from actual things you may want to say about the rated soldier but force you to just "check the box".

Then again, I may be interrupting what you're saying wrong, so feel free to correct me.

Response by SSG Private RallyPoint Member made Nov 3 at 2014 10:45 AM

SSG Private RallyPoint Member — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:45:32 -0500

The brief can be accessed here: https://www.hrc.army.mil/site/ASSETS/PDF/NCOER_Info_Brief.pdf

Draft NCOER:
http://usarmy.vo.llnwd.net/e2/c/downloads/363045.pdf