Joel Schofer's Career Planning Blog

Tips to Improve Your Concurrent FITREP

Posted on August 2, 2016 Updated on August 14, 2016

Yesterday an officer e-mailed me and asked for tips on improving his concurrent FITREP, which I thought would make a nice blog post.

A concurrent FITREP is most often received when you are deployed.  It is “concurrent” because not only are you getting a FITREP from your deployed command/unit, but you are also getting one from your home/parent command.  For example, I just returned from a deployment.  I was gone from September 2015 to June 2016.  I received both a periodic FITREP from my parent/home command and a concurrent FITREP from my deployed command.

Tips to improve your concurrent FITREP include:

1. Realize that operational commanders often know very little about medical/Navy FITREPs, so you want to do everything you can to make sure that none of these critical FITREP mistakes happen to you.
2. Try to get a strong soft breakout where the commander compares you to all officers of the same grade under his/her command either now or during his/her entire career.  For example, “In the top 10% of over 200 O4 officers I’ve rated in my entire career.”
3. Make sure your most important title/duty is in the box in the upper left of block 29.  For example, don’t put “PHYSICIAN” but “OIC” or “SMO”.  You can often score some titles that sound very important on a deployment, like “MEU SURGEON” or “GROUP SURGEON”.  You don’t want to waste them.

Otherwise, general FITREP advice can be found in the Basic Anatomy of a FITREP.