Excitement about Evaluation Changes

The overall sentiment about changes to the enlisted evaluation system and the new promotion boards is one of excitement, said CMSAF James Cody on Wednesday. The transition to a performance-based evaluation system is “going to be pretty abrupt,” but it is necessary to remove the human error component in the old setup, Cody told the audience during his talk at AFA’s Air and Space Conference in National Harbor, Md. “There’s just one flaw in the system that we have today: it’s us,” he said. He told reporters following the session that the problem with the previous evaluation system was that “everybody was getting fives” on a rising scale of one to five, making it difficult to evaluate who was truly worthy of promotion. The changes are coming “not [because] we promoted the wrong people,” he said, but because “systems must evolve over time to meet the needs and the demands of the institution.” As the demands of airmen’s jobs have evolved, so, too, should the methods to evaluate who will be doing those jobs, said Cody.