| This report describes the enlisted personnel promotion systems used by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force during the early to mid-1990s. The report should be of interest to anyone seeking a brief overview of the services' promotion criteria in the 1990s. |
| Although the report is descriptive and not meant to assess or analyze the services' promotion systems, the report also serves as an important reference for recent RAND research on the quality of enlisted personnel. In that research, a new measure of personnel quality is being developed. The new measure, based on an application and extension of earlier work done at RAND (Ward and Tan, 1985), develops a quality index that depends on entry characteristics as well as an unobserved quality factor. Empirical estimation of the new quality measure requires information about a service member's first-term promotion outcomes, and, to ensure confidence that differences in promotion outcomes correspond to meaningful differences in personnel quality, a description of the services' promotion systems becomes essential. The material presented in this report supports the notion that the services' promotion criteria are related to key aspects of personnel quality, including duty performance, leadership potential, experience, knowledge, and skills and therefore that promotion outcomes do correspond to substantive differences in personnel quality. Finally, the reader should recognize that the services occasionally revise their promotion systems, and therefore, information on the very latest promotion rules and regulations should be obtained directly from the services. |
| The related reports on quality are: |
| Hosek, James R., and Michael G. Mattock, Measuring the Quality of Enlisted Personnel in the U.S. Armed Forces, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, forthcoming. |
| Asch, Beth J., John T. Warner, James R. Hosek, Michael G. Mattock, Recruiting, Retaining, and Promoting High Quality Personnel: Towards Understanding the Adequacy of the Military's Compensation and Promotion Systems, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, forthcoming. |
| This research was conducted for Personnel and Readiness within the Forces and Resources Policy Center of RAND's National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the |
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