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Hi, have you heard of the NCORP? It's how the Air Force levels out enlisted career fields. Since the Air Force sets force-wide promotion rates, some career fiel

Hi, have you heard of the NCORP? It's how the Air Force levels out enlisted career fields. Since the Air Force sets force-wide promotion rates, some career fields end up with too many folks in some of the NCO grades. When that happens, they take the most junior folks in the grade and force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew. You have a short period of time to make a choice and submit a package. If you don't act, they pick one for you. They picked airfield management for me near the end of an enlistment that earned me a 5.0 SRB when I re-upped as a 3C072. I self-promoted myself to Mr, instead. This was in 2008. The Air Force has been bad at staffing for a long time. Once you have volunteered, the needs of the service are what matters. They attempt to accommodate, but in the end if they need you somewhere they're going to put you there.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew. How can that possibly work? How can you force someone to retrain into special operations? How does anyone build the motivation and determination to pass the qualification courses for that when they don't even really want to be there? Why would special operations even want someone who wasn't remotely a volunteer?
- true_religion 8y ago
  The big hurdle is volunteering to be in the military. Once you have though, you can’t quit whenever you want and can’t skip without serious punishments.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    No courses like those for special operations specifically let you voluntarily withdraw even for people already serving as they only want volunteers. The military isn’t all sir-yes-sir as people think - if you don’t want to be there then they don’t want you to be there either.
- mbrameld 8y ago
  You can only pick the ones you're qualified for, and the special operations jobs all require pre-approval to retain into. Similar with aircrew, if you want an aircrew job you have to get medically qualified before you can select it. If you don't pick a new job you just don't get to re-enlist. They don't force you into a job you don't want as far as I'm aware. I'm sure they have the authority (and your agreement when you signed the enlistment paperwork) to do so if they really needed to, but when I went through they just gave you a re-enlistment eligibility code that would prevent you from serving beyond your current obligation if you declined the jobs they selected for you. I'm sure it'd put you high on the list for force shaping if that was going on, too. E: forgot special duties were an option, too. If you applied for and were selected to be something like an MTI, MTL, or recruiter then you didn't have to retrain. I'm not sure what would happen after the special duty was done. Usually you would return to your career field once you're done, but I don't know if that's the case if you do the special duty to avoid NCORP retraining.

chrisseaton 8y ago

> force them to retrain into another career field. They give you a short list to choose from. Most of the jobs are special operations and aircrew. How can that possibly work? How can you force someone to retrain into special operations? How does anyone build the motivation and determination to pass the qualification courses for that when they don't even really want to be there? Why would special operations even want someone who wasn't remotely a volunteer?

true_religion 8y ago
The big hurdle is volunteering to be in the military. Once you have though, you can’t quit whenever you want and can’t skip without serious punishments.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  No courses like those for special operations specifically let you voluntarily withdraw even for people already serving as they only want volunteers. The military isn’t all sir-yes-sir as people think - if you don’t want to be there then they don’t want you to be there either.
mbrameld 8y ago
You can only pick the ones you're qualified for, and the special operations jobs all require pre-approval to retain into. Similar with aircrew, if you want an aircrew job you have to get medically qualified before you can select it. If you don't pick a new job you just don't get to re-enlist. They don't force you into a job you don't want as far as I'm aware. I'm sure they have the authority (and your agreement when you signed the enlistment paperwork) to do so if they really needed to, but when I went through they just gave you a re-enlistment eligibility code that would prevent you from serving beyond your current obligation if you declined the jobs they selected for you. I'm sure it'd put you high on the list for force shaping if that was going on, too. E: forgot special duties were an option, too. If you applied for and were selected to be something like an MTI, MTL, or recruiter then you didn't have to retrain. I'm not sure what would happen after the special duty was done. Usually you would return to your career field once you're done, but I don't know if that's the case if you do the special duty to avoid NCORP retraining.