Summary of Specialty Leader Business Meeting
Here is a brief summary of last week’s Specialty Leader Business Meeting that is always held in conjunction with the Graduate Medical Education Selection Board:
- Current interim Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) need to formally apply to the next screening board in summer 2017. I would STRONGLY encourage other people to apply as well because it is a screened/appointed leadership position that allows you to remain clinically active and that I also think will lead to promotion to O6 if done successfully.
- Announcements for nominative positions often come out with very little time until the nominations are due. They all require your CV, BIO, Letter of Intent (LOI), Officer Summary Record (OSR), and Performance Summary Record (PSR). It is best if you have these ready to go due to the often short timeline. I will tell you that I update my CV and military biography monthly and have multiple LOI templates at the ready at all times, so I practice what I preach. Your OSR/PSR can downloaded from BUPERS On-Line anytime, so that requires no prep (assuming BOL is working).
- Current overall Medical Corps manning is 103.4%. This is of no real use to you but is simply an interesting fact/statistic. It does, perhaps, limit our promotion opportunity a lit bit, but…
- The Medical Corps promotion opportunities for FY18 are expected to be higher than they have been in recent years. You never know the actual percentage until the board has concluded, but this is certainly good news.
- As of now, there is no change in the conference approval process. Sorry.
- The Career Intermission Program (CIP) has been extended until 2019. This program allows you to take up to 3 years off from the Navy to do something else, hit the pause button on progression toward promotion, and then return afterward. You have a 2:1 additional commitment for any time off. In other words, if you take 2 years off you’ll owe 4 years when you return. Some people have tried to use the CIP to do fellowships on their own, but that is not the intent of the program and requests for CIP to do a fellowship will be closely scrutinized by BUMED before approval. Info on the program can be found here or you can contact your Detailer.
- There is no special pays update. They are still awaiting the NAVADMIN. The latest can always be found here:
http://www.med.navy.mil/bumed/Special_Pay/Pages/default.aspx
Joel Schofer's Career Planning Blog 