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An investigation of the effectiveness of mandatory training among the U.S. defense acquisition workforce

This paper describes an investigation of the effectiveness of mandatory training for a sub-population of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition workforce members. The target population includes those who have participated in the Systems Planning, Research, Development, and Engineering career field training per the direction of the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA). An outcome-based competency model was used to develop training evaluation metrics; the model prescribes measuring training effectiveness across three tiers of systems engineering competencies: foundational, specialized, and leadership. A questionnaire was developed to measure the effectiveness of DAWIA training among a sample of the DoD systems engineering workforce. The results of the evaluation provide empirical evidence that the training does not effectively improve 17 systems engineering competencies, and is moderately effective at improving 11 systems engineering competencies among trainees. The evaluation metrics were demonstrated to be an effective tool for performing an evaluation of a sample of the trained workforce.