 Thanks to Blaze for talking an hour on a List of Force Development. He does it a lot better than I do. He's passionate about that. There's a ton going on in the A1. And A1D has a huge role in what we're getting after. And so I'm going to run through for the next couple of hours quite a bit of topics. And I'm going to tell you there's going to be some things that you've probably already heard of. You've probably seen them on social media, things like PRS, SJT, so on and so forth. I'm going to talk briefly about those, just kind of give you the why we're doing the things that we're doing within the A1 community, and then that way you're tracking. Because those things like that, SJT and PRS, those are happening right now. And so it's important that when you go back to your organization that you understand there's airmen in your formations that are affected by those two things as of February of this year. We'll talk about myeval and all that stuff as we go through it in action order A. But let's talk a little bit about force management. So we do own manpower within the A1. And when we talk about force management, I'm not necessarily going to get into the force restructure things that we've done. There's a whole lot smarter people in the world than me when it comes to manpower within our Air Force. But here's what I want you to know is in 21 we did force management voluntary programs. We were over in strength. COVID was very good to the Air Force. We had the highest retention rate that we had in a very long time. And so people weren't separating. And so we needed folks to get out because we were over in strength. And they said, here's your cap. Figure it out. And so we went with voluntary separation programs. And we had 1,400 approved applications. That's not a lot. That's not a lot when you're 9,000 over in strength. And so I'm sharing this with you because 1,400 approved applications. And we did ADSC waivers. When I was in the chief's group, they could normally wave 12 months. But during this time, we were able to wave 18 months of an active duty service commitment. So somebody that sewed on chief could separate, retire after the 18 month mark because we could wave the other 18 months of their 36 month ADSC. So things like that, we expanded palace chase opportunities. But 1,400 is not a lot of individuals. Why is this important to you? Because we're operating on a CR. You heard the briefing yesterday from Jeremiah Ross, the A8 SEL, talking about the POM, 23, the FIDEF, all of those things. We don't know what the future looks like when it comes to in strength. And so when I talk with my boss about force management programs, we don't know what's coming. But what I will tell you is, if we're over in strength and we're told, congressionally mandated, to get to this number, then we have to figure out a way to get to that number. We have normal attrition and so on and so forth. And all of that is calculated in there. But just to understand that right now, for 22, there's nothing on schedule for a force management program. But that doesn't mean in 23, there won't be. Why is that important for you? Because we all were in. I was a chief in 2014 when they said, here you go, chief. Here's your 17 master sergeants. I need a rank order 1 to N. Figure it out. And unfortunately, big Air Force, there was a cut line within the community. And so I had to have those candid conversations with every one of them and say, hey, somebody's got to be last. And unfortunately, it's you. I mean, that's a real conversation we have to have. And so understanding how to prepare our folks for separation, retirement, if need be, because I'm not saying that it's going to come. But it could. And it could be voluntary. And it could be involuntary when we get into 23 and beyond. And so just prep yourself for that. Prepare your formations for what could come. POM could drive a need for us additional force management measures. Still TBD. Still TBD. But and also understand too, here's the second piece of that that I need you as chiefs to understand, is with force management programs, there comes a bill. When we separate folks, there's a bill associated with that. And so I'm not one, and I'll be honest with you, when I get briefings and I talk about A-1, there's a lot of folks that will feel as, hey, we're not willing to do all of these things for our airmen. You heard Mack talk about it earlier. We can't do everything. And force management will drive decisions that will affect other programs within our air force. It'll drive decisions to affect other programs. Or whether that's a reduction in this program, cutting this program, not doing that program at all and starting it. And so just understand that. And those are the hard conversations that as chiefs we have to have. Because trust me, I love taking care of airmen too, just like you do. Been doing it a long time, so have you. And I want to give our airmen everything that we can. But when you're in conversations about how much money we have, this is what I've told the Air Force Senior Enlisted Leader Council before. You want to buy a Raptor. You can afford a Corolla. So here's what I want you to do with that Corolla. Tent the windows, get you a nice big fin on the back, however you want to deck it out. Make it your own. Make it your own. But you can't afford a Raptor. And so those are the hard conversations that we have to have in today's Air Force. And it's not me not wanting to give your airmen everything that they want, whether that's a bigger SRB, whether that's more tuition assistance, whether it's you name the program. It's a reality. Times are tough in the Air Force. And so we have to have those conversations. And one of those is about force management. So just understand that that right now there's nothing scheduled for 22. But that doesn't mean tomorrow that when we get a budget and all those things, and the palm is done, that we're not looking at 23 and beyond to do some force management. And then understand that there's a bill that's associated with all of those programs. We don't just kick people out without offering them some type of monetary compensation. And that's by law, right? That's by law that we offer a monetary compensation of some sort, right? So we just have to be careful on that. But that's the force management piece. And I just want you to understand kind of where our headspace is at, right? And when we talk about, you know, retention and things like that, it's important for you as a chief to understand why airmen stay. Job security, airmen stay in our air force because of job security. That's our number one. And this survey is done every other year, right? So every other year, the survey is sent out on why are you staying? Job security is number one. And that's very, or that's similar to the officers. It's number three for our officer corps. Choice of job and assignments is number six for us and it's number six for them. I want you to take 10 seconds, right? Or 12 if you're like me and you read slow and read all 10 of those. Read all 10 of those for me. You can take a picture or read it later if you want. It doesn't matter to me, right? Okay, that's why airmen stay. Here's why airmen leave. Choice of future job assignment, number five. I'm gonna go back to this slide. This is why they leave. What do you not see on this list? Anybody? What is it? Yeah, anything that you control in reality. Anything that you control is not on that list. What do you see on this list? Things that you control. People stay in our air force for reasons. People leave our air force for different reasons. Leadership of the squad you're level. Guess what chiefs? You're gonna be at the squadron level. You've been there already. Leadership is the number one reason why people leave our air force. Number two is job stress. Overall job satisfaction, unit climate and morale. My point is is people stay for things that you can't control. They leave for things that you can impact. I don't wanna say you can control it, right? But things that you impact. Your leadership, your guidance and direction has a huge impact on why people are leaving, right? It may be the airmen that decides to leave after four years because they have a bad staff sergeant supervisor where they've got a terrible section chief, right? That's still part of your responsibility as a chief within your organization. And so I want you to see this and you can take a picture of it or these will be part of that slide deck that I push out. And so you understand why people are staying on our air force and why people are choosing to leave. Every day, and you guys have heard this before, but every day somebody makes a decision to leave our air force. They vote with their feet, right? And they walk out the door because of something. That's telling right there when you look at that on why people leave. We have a lot of impact on why people leave our air force from the leadership level. And that's on us as chiefs, right? So let's get into a little bit of action order A, right? You guys know the action orders that are out there. Airmen is primarily the A1's responsibility. AETC has the first one, right? I don't want to take anything away from AETC, right? But a lot of the A1 programs, right? For action order A, a lot of those programs followed within the A1. But AETC does have the first line of effort. And so I don't spend any time talking about that one, but our partners in AETC are getting after how we advance, right? Airmen in our air force, right? Whether it's BMT tech training, all of those things. We do own the PME piece, right? And that's part of our discussion. I don't hit too much on PME, but we do own that piece in the Air Force A1. And so we have three lines of effort, right? Figuring out the airmen that we need, creating that framework. And so we've got four lines of effort. And so I'm gonna talk about all three of these, two, three, and four, that is specifically within the A1 as we go through this. All right, talent management. Mac talked a little bit about talent management system. I'm gonna talk about, you know, talent marketplace. I'm gonna talk about talent management as a whole, because what we do when it comes to EPRs, what we do when it comes to promotions, what we do when it comes to SRBs, what we do when it comes to, you name the program, there's a lot of things in the umbrella of talent management. But up in the left corner is what I want you to really focus on. Talent management is about figuring out what we value, what we measure, and what we reward. So when we're making decisions within the A1, or recommendations to the secretary, we think about those three things. What do we value? On the right side of that slide, you will notice a whole laundry list of things. These are things that are already in effect, right? And a couple of them up there, new senior NCO promotion process, February of 19, that was the removal of testing, right? When you look at, you know, a lot of officer stuff up there, but ALQ's addendum, how many of you have heard or seen the ALQ addendum that was pushed out over a year ago? Show of hands. That's not everybody in the room, right? And that's okay, that's kind of expected. That's why we're gonna talk a little bit about ALQs because those are coming, right? And so we did, looking at the ALQ piece, right? Geo promotion systems up there enlisted experience, situational judgment testing. I'm gonna talk a lot about some of those things, but the blue ones down at the bottom, it's hard to see that they're blue, but my Eval we're gonna focus on a little bit. We're gonna talk about feedback system with ALQs and then the evaluations, not just the system, but the actual feedback in EPR. But here's what I wanna really say to you right now is when we move into talent management systems, we've gotta have systems that are agile. We can't take three years to make an update. You know, I heard somebody mention this morning during Chief McElroy's time about my fitness and Mac's absolutely right. And so the goal of an MVP program, right? Minimal Viable Product is 80%. My boss wants to move out at 80% of a program, which means it's not gonna survive first contact. But I will tell you, his philosophy is if you wait till it's 100%, you're never gonna get there. And that's right because you know as well as I do, technology changes rapidly. And so if we wait till it's 100%, we're five years behind already. I don't know about you guys, but I use an iPhone 7. Anybody else use an iPhone 7? Anybody? Thank you, awesome. All right, good. At some point, I'm only going to be able to text those two people. The only reason I have a 7 is because Verizon a couple years ago sent me a text message and said your iPhone 4 will be shut off on this date. Please upgrade, right? I think the 10 was out and I still had a 4, right? Technology is not my thing. I don't really use it that much, but I do understand that we are behind in the Air Force when it comes to technology. And so we've got to have IT platforms and things like that that are agile. We've got to be able to make changes. And on the My Fitness as an example, we made over 100 changes to that program behind the scenes. Transparent to users, because we didn't have to shut the program down. Now some of you will say, well, yeah, but it was down for 60 days. I didn't say that. I'm just saying we didn't have to shut it down. But my point is, is there are things, if you have an agile program, you can do behind the scenes and work through those things. And it's, the end user doesn't even notice it. And so that's kind of our philosophy there. 80% we're pushing stuff out. But we've got to be agile when we do that. And so one of those things is restoring experience points. How many of you have heard of PRS? Promotion Recommendation Score, i.e. valuing experience. Show of hands. Show of hands. That's good. That's good. I'm gonna be honest with you. I briefed Senior NCO Academy last week. 25% of them had heard of it. That's on us. 25% of them have heard it. When I say us, I'm not talking A1. That's on us as Senior Enlisted Leaders. We've got to make sure that folks understand experience points. And so I'm gonna give you a little bit of history on this. Some of you may remember. But years ago, and it wasn't too long ago, when I say years, it wasn't like 1987. It was 2016, I believe, is when we started that. As we were reducing for three years, we were getting rid of time and service and time and grade points. So those of you that have been around a while, you know that you gain eight points every year just for living and breathing. And so the feedback given at that time was you can wait around and make enough points, time and service and time and grade to get promoted. But is that the right individual that we want promoted to that next grade? And so Chief Passard of the Air Force started at one year, the next one carried it on. And over a three year period, we reduced it every year by a certain percentage to where we had no time and service, time and grade points. Well, guess what we got after that? We got more feedback. And this time the feedback was now we're promoting younger folks, right? We're not valuing my experience as a two or three or four time tester. And so folks were getting promoted too early. And so we had to figure out and go back to the drawing board and figure out what we were gonna do to allow experience points to be calculated. And that's why I want you to know the history because that's why it wasn't like that was a bad choice, but we've got to figure out what's right for our folks. And so when we were going through this, we did a lot of modeling. We've got very smart people in A1, right, that understand data and they like to look at data. And so we run all kinds of models and we look at it, if you do this one, there's going to be four people in the Air Force that were promoted last year that would still be promoted based on this model. If you choose this model, there's going to be seven people that were promoted. If you choose this model, there's going to be three people promoted, right? That's the kind of data drill down that we were looking at when it came to PRS. And so here's the conversation I had with my boss. No matter what we do, you shouldn't need to pull out a calculator to figure out your points for EPRs, right? That's how it used to be. You know, you would get in the old system, right? You have one EPR, it's 100%, pretty easy. You get 250 points. If you have two EPRs, it's 60, 40, right? If you have three, it's, you do the math on that one, right? So it's very difficult, in my opinion, I'm not a math guy, right? It's challenging for individuals to figure that out. And is that the right system? I told my boss, I said, hey, the enlisted corps is very smart, but here's what I will tell you. Everything that we do needs to be simple. Not because we can't understand it, but why do we make things difficult when it comes to math? Why? We need to calculate that. And so when we went and looked at it, this is what we settled on, right? We made a couple changes. Number one was we removed, do not promote, because our view is if a commander says not ready now, that means to not promote you. You're not ready for promotion, pretty simple, right? So we removed that. There's four, right? Promote now, you get points, right? For your first EPR, second, oldest, and third. Why is this important to you right now? Because this goes into effect right now. We have staff sergeants that are testing for tech. Right now, they're using this system, right? And so I wanna show you how this kinda works out. And I know this was all part of the article, but some of you may not be tracking it, and I want you to leave here and be able to go have those conversations with those staff sergeants and ask them. Look them in the eyes and ask them how many points do you have for EPRs? And they should be able to quickly go boom, boom, boom. I've got three EPRs, I know exactly what it is, right? Because we wanted to make a system where we value your performance first, but we also value your experience. We shouldn't promote somebody, first time testing, that has the same evaluation, the same rating as someone with three years experience because they're a better test taker. And back in the old system, the person with experience walked into the testing room 30 points less. You got a first time tester that would get 250 points, right? That third time tester, based on the math right there, they had to promote now, they had to promote and they had to promote. They walk into that testing room, a 30 point deficit. They have to make up 30 points on the test to be promoted because we didn't take their experience into consideration. So you've got it, you can live, you can breathe, but you also have to perform under this new system. And so what we've done is we've created the PRS and the other one, those same examples, right? I've got three EPRs. The first time tester has 250 points. The third time tester has 250 plus 10 plus five. They walk into the testing room 15 point advantage over the first time tester, right? And it's simple. You can even do that in your head, right? Without a calculator. And so that's the PRS model. I want you to leave here, go back to your formations, have those conversations with the staff sergeants because like I said, this is in effect right now. It's in effect right now. And that leads me to talking about testing, right? Because we've got staff sergeants that are testing for tech. I'll share with you. I'm old, right? In 1981, I was in first grade. And I can remember, well I really can't, I'm making this up, but I know we did it, right? My teacher gave me a scantron form that said kids, right? This is in first grade, I was like five years old, right? We're gonna test your ability to read, right? 40 years later, 41 years later, right? We have FSS employees telling Airmen and NCOs when they walk into the testing room, they may not call them kids, but they say grab two number two pencils and a scantron form and take your promotion exam. 41 years later, it's time we get in the 21st century, two decades past the turn of it, right? So when we talk about situational judgment testing, right? I'm gonna talk about electronic WAPS testing as well, but those will at some point go together. Not yet right now, but the SJT is the piece that's coming right now. We give you a PDG, right? You grew up on a PFE PDG. You were excited, right? You'd get an email from the order of the room, you'd be the first in line if you were like me, right? I want that new 418 page PDG, right? And then you'd get it and you're like, why did I get this? Now I have to study, right? So you go through that book, right? There's all kinds of good things in there. There's all kinds of knowledge. And then you go get promoted, right? You go to a promotion test and there's knowledge based questions. Is that the best way to evaluate someone to serve at the next higher grade? Part of it is, but we also feel that situational judgment testing is the way that we need to do it, right? Especially since we're going to go back to what I said on the previous slide, couple slides ago, what do we value, right? We're moving to a competency based ALQ feedback and evaluation system, right? So the knowledge that you gain from the PDG, although I think it's important, right? I mean I was raised on it. The knowledge is important, but I also think the application of the skills that you have as an individual also should be evaluated for the next higher grade. And that's where the situational judgment testing comes in. It's scenario based. Why is this important to you as a chief? Guess what? Those same staff sergeants that I told you about on their EPR points, some of you are going to have a staff sergeant that walks into the testing room, opens the cover and sees a paragraph and it says, read the paragraph and answer the following questions. What is the most likely response? And they're looking for things like, where's the question on Pitson Barger, right? We're moving away from that. So instead of 100 questions on the PDG exam, we're gonna have 60 that are knowledge this year. 60 that are knowledge, 20 are going to be situational based. Paragraph. Here's the paragraph, read the paragraph. Four choices, right? What's the most likely, least likely? Whatever they decide to do. What's the best response, worst response? However they do it. Bottom line is based on those ALQs, you're gonna be able to answer that question, right? Here's what I need you to go back to your staff sergeant and senior airman testing for staff and staff's testing for tech is, they're gonna ask you, how do I study for this? You hand them the form of the 10 ALQs and say, here you go. This is what we expect of airmen, E1 to O10, right? You're not gonna find anything in the PDG on it. That's a good thing. And so we're gonna try that this year, see how it goes. And eventually you may see a split, right? A 50-50 split on situational judgment testing. You may see to where there's more situational judgment testing. I don't know what the future holds on this, but I think there's some goodness to that. If you think about it, when you went through ALS years ago, NCO Academy, senior NCO Academy, was there a lot of knowledge based questions? It's situational, right? It's situational. That's what we need to go to. We need to be able to have a member look at a scenario, read a scenario and pick a choice, right? Based on the ALQs, based on what they've learned, right? Because we all learn at different levels. Memorization for some people is great, right? Memorization for others, maybe they don't have that skill, but that doesn't mean they're not ready for the next level based on leadership, based on the knowledge that they've been given from raiders and mentors over the years, and so there's some goodness in situational judgment testing, and that's happening right now. This is the first cycle that we're gonna move to situational judgment testing. We're not ready for electronic WAFs testing, but that goes back to my 1981 first grade story. We gotta get away from Scantrons. We gotta get in the 21st century, right, and use digital platforms for promotion testing. In a perfect world, Derek Crowder's perfect world, you'd be able to do this from your dining room table, test for promotion. I don't know that we're gonna get there. I don't, but I will tell you, I've taken, in those of you that have taken certifications, I was scheduled for one a couple weeks ago and it was proctored, right? And so the exam, you know, ours would be proctored as well, whether that's at the education office or whether that's, you know, at home in a perfect world, I think that would be a little more convenient for folks, but I don't know that we're there yet, but one certification I took a couple weeks ago, I logged on at the appropriate time. My test proctor came on, video to video, right? She said, show me your ID cards. She said, okay, let's walk around your room. And I had to take my camera on my computer and walk her around my room to make sure that I didn't have posters up on the wall, right, there's programs out there, there's software out there that when I open up Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, Safari, you name it, they get a message on the other end, right? And that was part of her briefing to me. If you open up the Internet, I will know, right? So there's ways that we can secure it if that's the problem and that's the challenge. Again, I'm just telling you, perfect world, I think in the future, we can get there. I don't know where it goes from here, right? I really don't, but I want you to know that we're looking at doing that, you know, as far as the electronic wabs testing and getting away from the scantrons, but there's a bill associated with that. And if you want to move to a computer-based program versus scantrons, scantrons in number two pencils, you can buy them in bulk. They're very cheap, right? Computers in your local education office is not so cheap, right? And so figuring out what that looks like over the next two, three, four, five years is one of the things that we're getting after within the A1 portfolio on electronic wabs testing. But the SJT piece, absolutely go back and have conversations with your staff sergeants that are testing and hopefully there's no staff sergeant in our Air Force that opens up that test book and realizes that they were not prepared for the 20 questions that they're seeing before them. Which I also think too, when we talk about SJTs and we're reducing the number of questions that are knowledge-based, I think we have an opportunity as a force to reduce the PDG from 400 pages to a lesser amount. Not for study purposes, but just for awareness purposes and knowledge purposes. It would be great if someone read the PDG for something other than to get promoted. How many of you read it just for GWIS? Awesome, two of you. Right, but I mean, can you imagine, and this is just me having open mic night right now, be honest with you, imagine if the PDG was 50 pages. They said, here you go, this is what we want you to know as an airman. Here's 50 pages. I think that'd be fantastic. We'd all read it, right? But now we read the PDG a lot for promotions, right? Because it even tells you in there, this is a guide. This is not used for whatever, use the following references, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, that's just my vision in the rest of my time in the Air Force. All right, so let's talk about ALQ-based, right? Developing evaluation, moving into a digital platform, figuring out what the next generation of EPRs and feedbacks look like. Do you remember the last time we changed our evaluations in the Air Force? When was that? You gotta yell, I'm hard of hearing. 15, yeah, somewhere around 14 or 15. Do you remember when we changed it before then? I wasn't in either, so don't think that I, you know, I was in in 1989. But in 1989, we had the EPR. We went to the EPR in 1989. In 2014 or 15, whenever it was, we went to our current system we have right now. What changed in our current system from the old EPR? Yep, percentages for must promote, promote now. Do we still have inflation? Do we still have people that write bullets that no one else in this room understands? Yeah, so we have to think about when we're looking at how we want to develop and evaluate our force. All of those things come into play, right? And so one of the things you should be tracking is the 24 foundational competencies, right? The 24 foundational competencies, your airmen and BMT are understanding those. Do you know the 24 foundational competencies? Why are they important? Because if you look at the slide, that's what you know and what you can do. Performance is what you do and how well you do it. That's the difference between competencies, right? And performance, competency-based performance. And so the 10 ALQs came from the 24 foundational competencies. How long did it take you guys to memorize the airman's creed? How many of you now can, you can only say it when you're saying it with a group of other people? Yeah. I'll never forget it was 2000. When did we come out with the airman's creed? Anybody remember? Like six, somewhere around there? But I'll never forget, I was deployed in 2011 and I had a team of five sailors, right? It was me and five sailors. And we were joking around one day and they, you know, I show up to work and they were sarcastic at times and they're all locked up and they're saying the sailor's creed, right? Now, keep in mind, I'm the only Air Force person in the room, right? And so they're doing the sailor's creed and then they say, okay, starting to crowd at your turn, airman's creed. I said, well, it's new. And I'll never forget, this was an E3 in the Navy. He said, you're right, Sergeant, it's only been out for five years. Four years, five years, somewhere around there. Really kind of took me back like thinking, I can only say the airman's creed in a crowd of people. Right? And then you're the one that says like every third or fourth word because you know it, right? And I didn't know the whole thing. And so my point is, is our airman were learning it in BMT at the time. They were saying it every day, multiple times a day. That was going to tech training. They were saying it multiple times a day. But I, as their leader, as a senior non-commissioned officer in our Air Force, could not say the airman's creed without a crowd of people. I used that story to talk about the foundational competencies and the 10 ALQs. Our airmen are learning about these, right? We need to understand them because our airmen, right? Your formations are going to ask you questions on the foundational competencies and ALQs, right? Because that's what we're moving to for their performance feedbacks and their evaluation. Why? Because we have said as an Air Force, these are the 10 things goes back to, what do we value? What do we measure and what do we reward? And that's the 10 ALQs. We're going to develop you with the foundational competencies and the ALQs. We're going to evaluate you on the ALQs. And so you're going to see a culture change in the Air Force because we're going to look at senior airmen, staff sergeants. We're going to have to have conversations about emotional intelligence. We're going to have to have conversations about accountability. We're going to have to have conversations about innovation, right? Not just, well, here's my standard on coming to work on time. Here's my standard on suspense, right? That's all going to be part of the feedback, the 10 ALQs, right? But you will notice, and I put this, we put this on the slide so you kind of know where our headspace is at, is those 10 ALQs align with the major graded areas. Our commanders are evaluated on the major graded areas in the IG system. Guess what? We are now as well because those 10 ALQs fit nicely within one of those four major graded areas. Do all of you know the 10 ALQs? You're probably going to look at them tonight, right? At least before you go back to work, in case you get a question, right? But anyway, so as we talk about moving to a competency-based feedback evaluation, so on and so forth, this is kind of the myeval poem, right? This is what's happening. We're moving to a digital platform. So it's not going to be the old space of go out to EPUBs, download a form, do it, save it to your desktop, attach it to an email, send it to your supervisor. They'll save it to their desktop, so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Here's a question for you. In September of last year, when we removed the deputy evaluator, you guys remember that? We removed the deputy evaluator off of EPRs. How many of you, you've got to be honest with me, I'm honest with you, how many of you couldn't figure out how to get deputy evaluator off the form? That's OK, right? Reason being is once you click something in that box, you've got to copy the entire form to a new one, right? And that was a challenge. People were calling me, giving me feedback. Like it's September 27th. Copy it, you'll have it done by September 30th. If you're waiting on a change, I don't know that we can get a new form out there. We wanted to make that change for last year because it was perfect timing with Master Sergeant EPRs to get rid of the deputy evaluator. That was one of the things we wanted to do. If we were waiting on a new form, we probably, it wouldn't have happened. Not probably, it would not have happened by September 30th. But I do know that that created a lot of churn across the Air Forces because once you had, once you even clicked on that box and went to anything, it was over. You had to go to EPUBs, get a new form, download it, do all that stuff, right? In the new system, when we go to MyEval, it's digital. It's digital. You're going to log in, right? You'll have a different role, whether you're a raider, whether you're an additional raider. You're going to see senior raider over there. You're going to see unit commander, right? And whatever role you have, it's going to tell you what responsibilities you have in there. Number one, VPC is sunsetting, right? So you can applaud that. VPC is sunsetting, that's OK. It's a good thing, right? But we're moving to MyEval. And when we do that, it's not just going to be putting the old forms in. We're creating the entire new form. And so there's a crawl-walk run that we have to do to get to that. And I'm going to talk about the forms here in a second. But when we look at MyEval, four chiefs, on February 4th, your EPRs were loaded in MyEval. Because February 3rd is the SCOT. So February 4th, your EPR was loaded. Now, what I will tell you is I'm going to give you an example of when we say that, and then maybe the system doesn't always work. So I got the email that said you're Eval, or on February 4th, right? Chiefs Eval's are going to be in MyEval under MyFSS. So on February 5th, I went out there and I thought, well, I'm going to brief senior NCO Academy this week. Let me see what that looks like. And wouldn't you know it? MyEPR wasn't there, right? It was completely blank. You have no responsibilities. I'm like, well, that's awesome. There are no responsibilities. But so understand that there was a glitch. And so now your EPR, I informed the team of that that mine wasn't there. I don't know if it was just me or if there was a few other folks that didn't have that. But bottom line is your EPR is going to be done in MyEval as a chief select, right? It's going to be the old form, the current form. And so then this year, we're going to make the change to the new form starting with master sergeants in September. We hope. Just kidding, SimSaf. All right, so in September. Now, the feedback piece, that happens next month. And the reason that has to happen next month is six months from September is March. And so the feedback, the new feedback is going to be loaded in MyEval in March. And so if you supervise master sergeants that have EPRs that close out in September, you're going to need to do a feedback in MyEval on the new feedback form in March. Because in order to evaluate them in September, you've got to give them the baseline in March. It doesn't give them a full year, but that gives them six months. And so that's about the best we could do if we didn't want to implement this later than 22. And so we wanted to get it out the door in 22 versus 23 or 24. And so you can do a feedback in March, right, with the evaluation happening in September this year, right? Your EPRs, senior master sergeant EPRs in July will all be done on the current form, but in the new system. You'll be able to do a feedback on anybody in the new system on the new feedback form if you want, right? But while you're closing out those senior master sergeant EPRs in July, because you've given them feedback initially on the old form, you may want to continue that. But that form will be in MyEval as well, right? And so I think there's some huge benefits to doing it. And then once you're done, right, in MyEval, you give a feedback, you fill it out, you click submit, send, whatever the verbiage is, it goes to the RayT, right? And then it tells the RayT and the RayTuror schedule some time for feedback. Here was the question that we got the other day from a commander. It said, do we feel, right? It was an opinionated question. Do you feel that using a digital platform will take away from that face-to-face interaction? What do you guys think? I see some nos. You think so? Think it might? Here was my answer, is I don't think it will and here's why, because supervisors that are currently doing face-to-face feedback will continue to do face-to-face feedback. Supervisors that aren't doing feedback using the digital platform, it's going to force them to do feedbacks, because guess what? I can't do your EPR in the system until you verify that I've given you a feedback. It's impossible, right? And I'll be honest with you, I've had a lot of EPRs in my life, 29 of it, right? And the change that we thought was going to save the world was we're going to now have supervisors put the date on the form that says this is when a feedback was conducted. I'd look at some of those dates and it's like Memorial Day. I'm pretty sure I didn't have a feedback on Memorial Day. Bottom line is people have done it. Some of you may have done it. I've probably done it, right? Where I talk to them every day. I don't need to give them a formal feedback. Let me just put last Tuesday and call it good, right? Sometimes you have that, right? Your feedback was a week ago and now you're getting a four EPR. Well, all I had to do is put the date in there. But the system will now, you have to verify as the RAD that feedback was given before that EPR opens up in my Eval. So the answer to go back to the question is it's going to force the bad supervisors to at least give some type of feedback. And I believe that that's better than where we're currently at right now where they're not giving any type of feedback, right? And so great, great initiative here. We've got to be agile in this program. It's going to be all digital data. You'll be able to move it from radar to RAID-E. Feedbacks will only be seen between the radar and the RAID-T. Your EPRs will eventually be stored here in the new system. You'll be able to see them right in the new system, right past EPRs. Now it won't be because you don't have any old EPRs in the new system, right? And so there's some great capabilities of this system. So what I would ask you as chiefs, right? And here's some of the best advice I ever heard at one point. Don't unravel it before we unroll it. Give it a shot and then give us feedback. If it's not good, tell us what's not good about it. If we need to tweak some things, tell us what we need to tweak, right? Work through your FSS. We've had user acceptance testing for the last six months on my Eval, where we've given people access to this program and we've challenged them, break it, break the program. Give us feedback on what doesn't work so we can make it better. But what I ask you is don't go and unravel it before we unroll it, right? We need to move forward with IT transformation. And one of those things is my Eval and get away from having to go to e-publishing and if it's down, what do you do then, right? All of it's gonna be right there electronically in the system and so I look forward to this and I look forward to your feedback on how my Eval goes when we launch it, right? When we do the feedback form in March and then in September, when we get to that point, the A1SEL will welcome your feedback at that point, okay? All right, so let's talk about ALQs and what that looks like on a feedback. So we're developing the feedback and we're developing the EPR right now. We've got a team of experts, right? Across the Air Force we've done working groups. We love working groups, we do. Like to bring people together and talk about stuff and but really we're not the experts on it. I mean, we've got personalities that are the experts but you know, we're working in the Pentagon. Things are a little bit different. We need airmen that have boots on the ground, staff sergeants, tech sergeants, officers, right? That are affected by this new feedback and new EPR, right? And so we have brought folks in, we've done quite a few working groups. Our A1H talent management cell has done a lot of great things but you're gonna see that this new form, you're still gonna have questions getting to know your airmen, right? Still gonna have those 10 questions, right? Do you have a mentor? Do you have, you know, enough money in the bank? Whatever those 10 questions are, right? That's gonna be probably version 3.0 or 4.0 where we really get after those 10 questions and figure out what's the right 10 questions but for right now we're gonna use those 10 questions because our main focus is on the actual, you know, what are we looking at for our performance for our airmen? And that's the 10 ALQs. And so this is a snapshot of what it can look like, excuse me, in the system. And so you will notice, right? When you go to do the feedback, it's gonna say right up there, number one, job proficiency, that's an ALQ, right? Are they proficient in their job? Then you've got five blocks, right? Far left, not so good. Far right, really good, right? And then three blocks in between. And so that's what the feedback is going to look like right over here, executing the mission, right? Job proficiency. You'll be able to put comments in there, right? On that feedback and then send it, right? How many of you have ever gotten a two or three page feedback form? Wow, that's impressive. How many of you have gotten like eight words? You're doing great. Keep it up airmen Crowder, right? That's my feedback and because they put it on a form, they were able to put a date on the back of my EPR and said you're doing great. Keep it up airmen Crowder, eight words, right? This here is gonna be an opportunity right there. We're even looking at where you can do this on your phone, right? Probably not an iPhone 7 for you two, but for those of you that have upgrades, right? We're hopeful that you can do this right from your phone, right? Fill it out, moving on into the system, right? That's one of the things, that's being agile. That's one of the things that we're hopeful we can get to with this one, whether it's this year or that's part of being agile in 23, 24, moving beyond that, we'll see, right? But this is the new, a version of the new ALQ feedback. That's going to be in there. Here's the thing which you need to know. You've got 10 ALQs. If you don't have a printed copy of the 10 ALQs, print that out and put it in the binder in the books that I see all of you guys carrying, right? Print that out, have it with you. Talk to your airmen about that. Talk to your formations about what the ALQs are and what they mean. Because some of our staff sergeants, and this isn't a crack on them, some of our staff sergeants may have a hard understanding and I'll be honest with you, some chiefs and seniors may have a hard time understanding emotional intelligence and how to explain that to an airman or explain that to a staff sergeant. So that's where we've come in. The 10 ALQs are out there. We got a lot of feedback on the ALQs and it was all positive. And so we made a decision over a year ago, slapped the table, we're moving to ALQs. So it's coming, right? We can fight it all we want, but the new feedback on ALQs and the new evaluation using the airmen leader qualities, they're coming, right? And so we need to make sure that you're talking to your formations about what that's going to look like. So that's the eval, right? Or that's the feedback. This is the eval. It's not, don't take a picture of this and put it on airmen, in-CEO and senior in-CEO page because that's probably not what it's going to look like, right? That's a mock-up of what folks are thinking. We've got a few different COAs of what we're looking at for the eval. I'm going to give you my vision, right? Here's my vision. Look to the far right, okay? You've got job proficiency, initiative, and adaptability. All three ALQs that go under executing the mission, right? This COA, take that line on the right, slide it over to the left to the middle. Remove the two horizontal lines. You have three ALQs and you have one big square box. Type away. And if you can figure out how to get bullets in there, let me know. Because your bullets are going to be half of a line. Because that was part of the feedback when we talked about this, is if we want to change to narrative, and that's why I talk about that when we're on this slide, if you want to move to narrative, you have to change the culture. And if you want to change the culture, my belief is you have to change the box and the layout because here was my fear, is if we had ALQ number one, job proficiency, and then underneath that, we had a horizontal line. What would most people go back to? A bullet, right? But if you have a box, it's much harder to write in a bullet. Now, Chief Blazer talked about the narrative writing guide, right? We've got a team of folks working on that. I'm gonna be honest with you, if it was my job to do a writing guide, and it's kinda is, right? They fall in A1, right? Kinda is, but yeah. Simzapist has tasked A1, but I'm saying, if she said DC, I want you to be the only one that does a writing guide. Here's what it would be, right? Here's what it would be, it'd be one sentence. Please write sentences in English, right? Plain language. And so we're gonna do a writing guide. We don't know what that's gonna look like because we're still working through what narrative looks like for 1206s, what narrative looks like for all the different awards. But what I tell people, and this is what I told the group chiefs at their course last week, is you write decorations all the time. Do you write them in bullet format? No, you write in sentences. Most of you in this room are educated. I have never written a paper for a university that said, give us your best bullet format. The point is, is we know how to write sentences. So when we go to narrative, I don't believe it's that difficult. Now we're gonna have to provide some guidance and that's what SimSafs asked us to do. And so our folks in talent management cell along with Blaze and his team in A1D, they're having discussions on the narrative piece and we're gonna put a writing guide out there that eliminates all of the extra acronyms and abbreviations and all of that other stuff. And then what it's also gonna say is this is the Air Force writing guide to be used at the 27th cell, to be used at the 673rd, to be used at the first fighter wing, to be used at the fifth bomb wing. This is the Air Force writing guide because we all know that when we get assigned to a different base, everybody has their own writing guide and your wing writing guide has to have things that is in the Magcom writing guide and the Magcom writing guide. Okay, all of that stuff is ridiculous. We need one writing guide, move to narrative. So that's kind of my pitch on the narrative piece but we've got three or four CoAs of what the evaluation looks like. And narrative is part of that because we are moving to that along with the new evaluation. And so that's my personal opinion right there. I'm a supporter of that CoA, if I wasn't, I probably wouldn't use that as my example. But that's what I like because I believe we can change the culture when we change the format. We've got some smart folks on the team. One of them actually suggested, they said, hey, what do you think if we just made it max, kind of like a tweet, right? And I don't use Twitter, right? But how many characters can you tweet? You might know. It's like 140 or something like that, right? But when they said, imagine if we made it like a tweet to where you just started typing, right? And it said max 300 characters. And then whenever you put a period and hit enter, it created a box around your words. Why would that be a good idea? Because then you don't have to worry about white space. That's all part of the culture that we have to change. You can see Raiders who focus on no white space. We just did all of our A1 functional awards the other day, right? And I reviewed all 17 of them. And I could tell what Raiders were brought up with no white space because they did the control YZ space, right? To where it takes it all, it like changes the form. I don't know how they do that. I mean, I do, I just don't do it, right? And some of you might do that because you want that extra space in there. Let's get rid of all that nonsense. That's what that is. What did they do? How well did they do it? That's what we should be evaluating on. Not how much white space is left at the end of the block, right? So you're going to see a culture change. You really are, right? We're going to shift that, try to shift that culture but it's going to take all of us in this room to do that. And so more to come on the my eval. We've got, the middle of March is when my boss has said, hey, here's when I want the briefing to make the decision and then we'll put it in front of Chief Massar of the Air Force and the AFSOC, get their blessing on it. And then we'll move forward with the contractor to start wire framing what the form will look like. So we're ready in September. So we've given ourselves the middle of March as the deadline or that's my boss's deadline. He said, let's put some CoAs together. I want to know what that form looks like. Of course we will get the opinions of our most senior enlisted leaders in our Air Force. See what they're thinking, right? Which we've been doing that throughout the process but this will be kind of the table slap. And then that's what the new form is going to look like. Is it going to be perfect? No, it's not. We know that. Nothing is. Are we still doing EFDP? Yes, right? That's not a change that we're moving towards this year. Is there discussion on that? Yes. Is there discussion on potentially, you know, not doing EPRs for selects? Somebody brought that up the other day. I thought, well, that's kind of a good idea, right? Maybe we look at that. Bottom line is, is we're looking a lot of things when it comes to changing the mindset and the culture of how we do feedbacks and any evaluations in our Air Force. All right, and I talked a little bit about this narrative writing. I don't really need to slide because I talked about it on that last one but here's the thing at the end, right? You're going to be a chief. Don't be that chief that when they get done with this course and we go to narrative writing, you all of a sudden have an English degree. Let your people write in plain language. Plain language, right? And we've taken, the team has taken evaluations from the Navy, they've gotten evaluations from the Army, they've gotten evaluations from the Marine Corps and we've looked at all of the ways that they do narrative writing and bullet writing. And so we're not making this decision in a vacuum. We're looking at how the other services do it to take ideas from them because why reinvent the wheel when those services are already doing either full narratives or partial narratives. And so that's what we're considering and taking into consideration to make it. Because that's part of the feedback that Chief Bass probably gets from the DSELC is your evaluations are hard to read. It's hard, transcom, right? Comparison to what other services do in the Air Force. It's probably very difficult for our co-com and our joint community leaders to understand what the Air Force means and what we say and how they can take care of you as a senior master sergeant or you as a master sergeant back in the day when you're working on a J-staff at transcom or south com or you name it, right? Writing in plain language gets after that in my opinion. I think we fixed that a little bit. I think we fixed that. All right, so let's talk a little bit about care solutions. Focusing on Airman Moore, right? LOA, Airman. So I'll be honest with you, there's no success on this slide. None, none. It's a slide about DAF suicides. I don't put this up here to say, look at us. Look at what we've done as an Air Force. I put this up there to show you we're trending in the right direction. We're lower than we've been in five years, but don't stop. Success on this slide is zero, and we all know that, right? You say it, your leaders all the time say, when we talk about suicides, and so that's why I put this slide in there. It's not the show that we're making progress. It's the show that we're making progress, but we need to continue to get that number lower. And also, to understand that our active duty number is lower, but what about that gray box at the bottom? Our civilians, right? We can't forget about our civilians, and their number is growing. Their number is growing, and so I will tell you, the next slide talks about risk factors. Here's what you really need to know about that. Relationships, finances, and 71%, the last statistic that I saw three weeks ago. 71% of suicides. Are by gunshot. 71%, that's significant. So we have programs out there, the A1Z team a few years ago, right? We bought a, the Air Force bought a bunch of locks, sent them out to the bases, right? If you live on base, you're supposed to register your guns, right? With security forces, that's part of it too. However, what about the off base folks? They don't have to. So we're not done yet. We're not done yet. We're getting better, but that's not success. We've got to figure out how to get that number to zero. And again, this is a family business. This is a family problem that we have to figure out together, right? And so that's the point on suicides we talk about. We're always taking ideas from the field, right? And how we can get after that. And so I welcome those two before I get out of here in the next couple of days, is if you've got ideas, give them to us, right? Because it's about taking care of airmen. It's about taking care of airmen and families. And so we've got experts that do that. But again, you're closest to the ground. You're closest to the fight. And so we'll always take your input. But with that, I think she has moved from the corner down to here, so that means we are on...