Army Communication & Information Systems Specialists (Sig Op, Lineman and LCIS Amalgamation)

[Rigger052]

  To Sig op

  You can try switching over to line on the PRES side of the house, although to be fair you will face obstacles there. As you are in a comm res unit you should inquire as to the state of the QL3 package, as I'm not sure if it takes two years or three now to get your full QL3 trg complete. Also the line sect in your unit will have to have a vacant spot that you can fill, so check there as well. While pole line construction and antenna rigging are taught on your course, as a class A reservist you might not have any opportunity to do so.

  Hopefully your investigations go well, if you have any concerns contact the LCF (senior lineman) in your unit, I can give you some info but all my time in trade has been in the reg's. Good luck.

 

[chrisf]

I'm already intimately familiar with the trade, and our local line section, that's not a problem, but no one locally seems to know where the line trade is headed, reserve side, with the amalgamation.

Then only real obstacle now is whether or not the CO will accept my OT. However, his options are accept my OT or accept the fact I will be finding a new unit, so I imagine it will result in me leaving the sig op trade regardless.

 

[Rigger052]

The writing boards for the courses themselves are still in progress so everything is still on a watch and shoot basis. Good luck with your OT 

 

[Jimmy67]

Interesting to hear the ideas about what we should be teaching this new, twenty-five hat wearing, happy family of super-communicators... I am sure some will be offended by what is below, but oh well...

We are being fished for opinons and input as I speak, to try and make some sense of this mess, but I don't hold much hope... Despite the fact that a large majority of those I am on course with (6A) come from backgrounds other than tac rad (including myself), CFSCE seems to still think we are in 1981, sitting in the woods of Germany, getting ready to fight Ivan. I see little change in ideas from my TQ3 so many moons ago, but technology and the battlefield has changed beyond all recognition. The only ideas we seem to have adopted are more and more crushing, corporate-style paperwork. The training and recruiting side of the house has seen the new technology coming for years but done nothing. Why?

If anything, we are becoming MORE specialized, not less, and we should be creating new trades, not shoving trades together to try and solve manning problems. Until we fix the perceived issues that keep people from wanting to be sig ops, no amount of deck chair shifting, verbal semantics, or negative incentives will solve the problem.

Until those of us who do other work besides sitting in green trucks, or working in CPs are taken seriously and valued as tradesmen, nothing will change, and meeting PML will be a pipe dream...

 

[PuckChaser]

The SigOp 6A course is fairly useless, unless you're just looking for a check in the box. I took mine last year, and we were told they weren't touching it until the new trade came in. A month of briefings from SMEs (some read a canned powerpoint) from units and technologies we may not ever see, with a final field ex to site a Bde CP does not a Sgt make. Shoving linemen and LCIS kicking and screaming with us won't solve anything. I think you hit the nail on the head, when you said we need to specialize. Make sub-trades of SigOp that you don't have to OT to move between if you don't want to be a CP Guy/IT Tech/Etc anymore.

"You can do a lot of stuff" just isn't a great recruiting tagline.

 

[JBP]

So, I must admit, and doubly apologize that shortly after I wrote the first post in this thread, I went AWOL from army.ca basically...  :-[

Nonetheless, I've been doing some catching up reading through bits and pieces on here of the 15 pages...

I have no new info... All I've heard/known first hand, is that some Sig Op Sgt's, MCpl's etc, from my unit (1 Sigs CFB Edmonton) and other units in LFWA have been going to Kingston at different intervals to put thier .5Cent into the new 'trade' training, specifically the 3's and 5's. I'm also loaded onto my 5's coming this June, and apparently it's a 'new and improved' 5's with a distance learning package etc... Will report on how new and improved it might be... Haven't heard rave reviews, but I need to get the course under my belt no matter what obviously! So off to the centre of excellence for me.

Keep any 1st hand knowledge of the amalgamutt coming folks!

 

[Mikhail]

This amalgamation makes researching careers very interesting. In the civvie world I have a lot of time-in doing roughly equivalent Lineman, LCIS, and Sig Ops stuff as well as project and department management. Over the last 25 years in Tech I have had a chance do a lot of cool stuff, and now hope to bring these skills to the CF. I am already finding it 'interesting' to pick one of these 3 career paths, based on prior civilian experience( a recruiter should be able to help here)... and now there is more choices in the works?.... hmm... I suppose that may make it easier.  :-\

Has any of the new trades 'sub classes' info gotten to recruitment centers yet? Would I be wasting recruitment's time by asking? Or should I just put off CT'ing to Reg Force till this is resolved. I am currently Res Force, and wanting to CT/OT NOW but do not wish to waste the CFs time with making a bad initial career choice based on changing info, and/or CTing to Reg, and being in some way disappointed with the choices available upon amalgamation resolution.

If this question is better served in a recruitment forum, my bad... please relocate it as the MODs see fit.

I have been lurking and reading till my eyes have dried up, and now thought I would try a first post.

Thank you.

 

[PuckChaser]

The F of S just gave us a PowerPoint printout of the tentative MES structure and career paths for each of the Sub Occ.'s and DP levels. What it looks like to me, is that LCIS got split between fixing army kit/radars/satcom (CST) and administrating/installing/troubleshooting computer networks (IST). LST is just a renamed Lineman trade. Core ACCIS looks like what SigOps do now, minus working with "computer" stuff (including NCCIS), which has been given to the IST sub occupation.

During a discussion between the Sigs we had on ground (SigOps and LCIS), bunfights were already starting to develop. This MES thing is going to be far easier for the new Ptes in the system to digest, than to the old hats who are of the mind that when it comes to the results we produce "if it ain't broke, why fix it".

 

[meni0n]

Puck, so for anyone who would want to go the IST route, they'll have to do POET?

 

[Swingline1984]

The last power point I saw (which was just sent this week from the MES Manager ahead of a briefing we will receive in June) stated that the Sig Op trade will be roughly divided in half to fill both the core ACCIS and IST positions.  Also, I don't remember that any of the slides which illustrated the core skills required/Development Periods (DPs) included POET, even for CST...I will, however, confirm that when I get back to work on Monday.

 

[PuckChaser]

I didn't see POET on the slides, and I think Swingline and I both have the same set. If there was a POET component, and its not on the slides, it'll be watered down and place into the ACCIS core DP1 course, so wherever you get streamed, you have an electronics theory base.

SigOp split in half makes sense, since JSR is mostly NCCIS and that job skillset is moving to IST. So as it looks now, if you don't want to go to JSR below the rank of Sgt/WO, stay ACCIS Core.  >

 

[bang]

Puckchaser,

Would you be willing to pass the ppt to anyone granted through the dwan?

 

[PuckChaser]

Yep, only for the next day or so. I'm on Op Cadence and won't be in the office. If you send me a PM with your DWAN today, I'll get it to you when I'm in the office tomorrow morning. Open to anyone else that wants a copy as well, just send me a PM.

 

[Alpheus]

For what it's worth, but some friends of mine in Kingston have told me that all Sig Op and LCIS QL3's for the rest of the year have been canceled and the new ACCIS courses will only start in Jan next year.  They didn't mention POET.

Still RumInt, so take with plenty of salt.

 

[Swingline1984]

One of the key efforts of MES was to reduce combined training days to create Sigs faster.  One of the earliest briefings I had on it discussed reducing initial training to 72 days total (doesn't leave much room for POET).  If the briefing I have at the end of the month bears any different fruit I will post it here.

 

[REDinstaller]

POET on its own is over 100 Trg days, so I can't see that being part of the QL3 ACCIS ever.

 

[rmc_wannabe]

The Last MES brief I heard they were adamant that POET would be reduced in training days, or scraped for QL3. I remember a thorough discussion going on in which the Army F of S stated something along the lines of "We need to stop training Sgt's at the Pte(B) level. Technical skills are developed, not rammed down the throat in a hundred training days."

 

[Occam]

The Last MES brief I heard they were adamant that POET would be reduced in training days, or scraped for QL3. I remember a thorough discussion going on in which the Army F of S stated something along the lines of "We need to stop training Sgt's at the Pte(B) level. Technical skills are developed, not rammed down the throat in a hundred training days."

The Army F of S had better tell the dozens of community colleges that are teaching electronics technician/technologist programs that they've been doing it all wrong, then.

A tech needs a core set of skills, and they aren't going to acquire it in under 100 training days. 

 

[Jammer]

I'll pass it on.

 

[PMedMoe]

A tech needs a core set of skills, and they aren't going to acquire it in under 100 training days.

Most days I've been up near CFSCE, students are getting out for lunch at 1130, going back after 1300 and sometimes getting off before 1500.  Of course, I have no way of knowing if they're POET students or not.

I have always found that most military courses have added days for whatever reason and this usually results in the course being longer than it needs to be.  However, most schools will not give up those days because it's too hard to get them back when they really do need them.