Joel Schofer's Career Planning Blog

What are KSAs?

Posted on August 24, 2020 Updated on August 22, 2020

KSAs are Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities that Naval personnel are supposed to possess in order to do their jobs well. In order to ensure Naval medical personnel meet and exceed their operationally-focused KSAs, Navy Medicine is developing standardized enterprise-wide Naval Medical Readiness Criteria (NMRC), in support of readiness performance metrics. I stole that from slide 2 of this 4 slide PPT deck, which you should read as it provides some background:

KSA Slides

As you can see from this portion of slide 3, the NMRCs are a work in progress and are actively in development:

That said, the SG signed this memo on 14 JUL 2020 establishing the NMRCs in these 2 attachments:

Enclosure 1 – Combat Casualty Care Team

Enclosure 2 – Non-Combat Casualty Care Team

You should check out these attachments and see if your specialty has approved NMRCs.

How will people actually monitor and achieve these NMRCs? The Naval Medical Force Development Center (NMFDC), a part of BUMED, is developing dashboards to easily allow individuals and commands to see where they stand on their NMRCs. Once developed, it will be the Navy Medicine Readiness and Training Commands/Units (NMRTC/Us) that work to get their personnel ready and meeting their NMRCs.

If you look at the NMRCs, you’ll notice that they each have 3 categories:

• Category 1 – Core Practice/Clinical Currency – Fundamental training and skills, usually obtained through medical education and maintained through Medical Treatment Facility (MTF) experience and/or partnerships. This category of requirements links to the attainment of core practice, clinical currency, and KSA Threshold for medical personnel. ***Note that this is how KSAs fit into NMRCs, as part of category 1.***
• Category 2 – Expeditionary Skills for Readiness/Readiness Currency – Combat Specialty Knowledge – Individual skills specific to operating in an expeditionary environment. Category 2 Readiness Criteria ensures transference of Category 1 skills to the expeditionary environment, including patient care during combat operations. Category 2 Readiness Criteria also includes general platform training requirements for an individual specialty across the potential operating environment to which the individual would be assigned. This category of requirements links to the attainment of readiness currency.
• Category 3 – Platform Training for Readiness – Readiness Proficiency/Operational Platform – Team/Unit-level training specific to a platform or unit to which a Service member is assigned. This category of requirements links to the attainment of readiness proficiency and, as such, joint interoperability.

In other words, for me it isn’t just about being a competent Emergency Physician who meets his Emergency Medicine KSAs (Category 1) but also about applying that competence to the expeditionary setting (Category 2) and the specific platform I’m assigned to (Category 3).

If after reading this summary you have questions about KSAs, please ask your Specialty Leader. If they don’t know the answer, NMFDC is probably the next stop for answers (contact info is on page 2 of the SG’s memo) but the Corps Chief’s Office can certainly help with anything that is unresolved. CDR Wendy Arnold, Policy & Practice Officer, would be the first stop and her contact info is in the global address book. Lastly, you can always contact me.