superior to ours. Special reports and exhibits obtained in London from the British War Office, covered their whole program of recruitment, classification, trade-testing, assignment and transfer; industrial furloughs; weekly consolidation and analysis of strength reports; and plans for demobilization.
This in outline is a picture of the personnel work, begun in the National Army cantonments with the arrival of the first trainloads of drafted men. Neither the civilians nor the Army Officers who initiated this development dreamed of the scope it would so rapidly assume or the share it would have in effecting the speedy organization of a well balanced Army, trained and ready for the critical hour in France.
The Committee on Classification of Personnel in the Army as such has disappeared. After fourteen months of service under the Adjutant General it was transferred to the General Staff and merged with the Central Personnel Branch, newly created to supervise the procurement, placement, transfer and promotion of officers throughout all branches of the Army. This means that centralized control of personnel work for both officers and soldiers is recognized and thoroughly established as an integral part of the United States Army organization.
Among the legacies left to the Army by the Committee, such as the qualification card, the index of occupations, the trade specifications and the standardized trade tests, not the least significant is the concept of personnel specifications with all that that term implies regarding analysis and definition of duties and formulation of requirements as to the physical, intellectual, educational, technical and personal qualifications required for the performance of those duties.
The concept of personnel specifications is quite as significant for industry and education as it is for war. The college student pursuing an electrical engineering course or a course in interior decoration, or the young woman who aims to be a secretary or a social worker or a teacher of the arts and crafts, needs a clear definition of precisely the duties for which he or she is being trained.
Let the student have before him a full and explicit description of the duties of the job he must be able to hold down after graduation, and of the qualifications in the form of particular sorts of skill, technical knowledge, general abilities and personal traits which he must possess if he is going to make a success of that job. Let each instructor be in a position to speak with authority when challenged to justify every
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