SELRES to VTU Question (Acronym Heavy)

[snake020]

I just, *sigh*. To anyone reading this considering SELRES, you should really do your homework on your unit. It's not like Active Duty. You get to pick. You can pick a unit halfway across the country and drill at an NRC closer to your house. There's contact information for every billet in JOAPPLY. Call them. Ask what their expectations are. Some are hard over on 0700-1500 drill days. Some are flexible for khaki. Some let you telework. I've seen my CO in person once in 3 years.

Demanding you work outside of drill weekends for free is quite extreme and should be frowned upon if you have good unit leadership. If that expectation exists for some real reason, paid RMP and ADTs exist for this reason, or at a minimum an unpaid drill. I'm a unit OIC and my asks of my khaki outside DWE are maybe 2-3 small things a month that take 5 minutes. Like mustering a sailor, approving a reschedule, NROWS approving, DTS, whatever. I'd say I do ~4hrs of navy work a month and I use RMPs when able (not many in the funding world we live in) and unpaids otherwise. Mostly DWE prep and the standard admin tasks.

What you describe is not the universal experience. There's been a significant push across the force to make members travel onsite to their cross assigned (CAI) units regularly under penalty of your paper balancing out the RSCA since now the UMUICs hold the pen on FITREPs.

It also doesn't matter how good a unit's leadership is if the NRC is the tyrant causing all the pain and threatening admin Us for not getting their taskers done outside of the DWEs.

 

[sevenhelmet]

What you describe is not the universal experience. There's been a significant push across the force to make members travel onsite to their cross assigned (CAI) units regularly under penalty of your paper balancing out the RSCA since now the UMUICs hold the pen on FITREPs.

It also doesn't matter how good a unit's leadership is if the NRC is the tyrant causing all the pain and threatening admin Us for not getting their taskers done outside of the DWEs.

You both make good sense.
Unfortunately, the experience I cited in my post was from an O6 in my region, during a jacket review for “how to continue my career as a reserve O5”.

Said O6 was adamant that significant time had to be spent on the road, and when I asked, confirmed that much of it would likely be at my own expense in order to “keep up with duties” and “show sufficient commitment to the Navy”. He was quite matter-of-fact, and did not seem to think any of it was the least bit unreasonable. I ended the meeting as quickly as professional courtesy permitted after that.

Look, I get it. I cast my lot, and genuinely think this guy was giving me the best advice he had on tap for a VTU O-5 in a small, remote NRC. The lift required simply wasn’t compatible with my life goals- although the “travel at your expense for the Navy’s benefit” was a bit of a surprise. I only did the jacket review as a favor to my CO, who is a good dude.

 

[SynixMan]

What you describe is not the universal experience. There's been a significant push across the force to make members travel onsite to their cross assigned (CAI) units regularly under penalty of your paper balancing out the RSCA since now the UMUICs hold the pen on FITREPs.

It also doesn't matter how good a unit's leadership is if the NRC is the tyrant causing all the pain and threatening admin Us for not getting their taskers done outside of the DWEs.

1) Unless you have to be an O-5 or O-6, who cares? You can retire as an O-4 with 20. You could also do continuation and they'd love you in this manning environment.
2) They cannot make you reschedule or travel for IDT if you are cross assigned. AT needs to be with your unit, but it's paid and travel paid for.
3) Your point about bad NRC leadership is true, but again, there's plenty of pure telework jobs for officers. Individual unit OICs have a lot of discretion and the NRC leadership can only administer Admin Us for a specific set of items (failure to do medical on DWE for example). In my 4 years I've only seen Admin Us for legit reasons. It helps I'm at one of the largest NRCs maybe?

 

[MIDNJAC]

I just, *sigh*. To anyone reading this considering SELRES, you should really do your homework on your unit. It's not like Active Duty. You get to pick. You can pick a unit halfway across the country and drill at an NRC closer to your house. There's contact information for every billet in JOAPPLY. Call them. Ask what their expectations are. Some are hard over on 0700-1500 drill days. Some are flexible for khaki. Some let you telework. I've seen my CO in person once in 3 years.

Demanding you work outside of drill weekends for free is quite extreme and should be frowned upon if you have good unit leadership. If that expectation exists for some real reason, paid RMP and ADTs exist for this reason, or at a minimum an unpaid drill. I'm a unit OIC and my asks of my khaki outside DWE are maybe 2-3 small things a month that take 5 minutes. Like mustering a sailor, approving a reschedule, NROWS approving, DTS, whatever. I'd say I do ~4hrs of navy work a month and I use RMPs when able (not many in the funding world we live in) and unpaids otherwise. Mostly DWE prep and the standard admin tasks.

My comments were speaking specifically to the senior O-5 promoting into O-6 jobs in SELRES. All you say should be true for any NOSC/NRC O-5 or below. O-6+ SELRES (i.e. not the NRC) is a different world, from what I have gathered. One which I do not wish to join personally.

 

[SynixMan]

My comments were speaking specifically to the senior O-5 promoting into O-6 jobs in SELRES. All you say should be true for any NOSC/NRC O-5 or below. O-6+ SELRES (i.e. not the NRC) is a different world, from what I have gathered. One which I do not wish to join personally.

100% Agree in that regard. Non-flying SELRES O-6s can expect to get the Djibouti Base CO gig to stay upwardly mobile.

Maybe my ambition is low but SELRES is the first place where "Up or Out" doesn't apply strictly.

 

[LAMPS Ninja]

+1. Too many late night teleconferences during the week for various forums, mid week reactive taskers with expectations to resolve in days well outside of drill weekends. I checked in with a former community lead who retired after a senior O-6 role as CNIFR chief of staff, and he said he was spending about 3-4 hours each day nightly doing that work during the week, every day. Then add in the expectations to travel cross country or overseas at my expense for drills, and my sentiment rapidly changed.

This matches my Gen Pop SELRES experience exactly after I left my hardware unit upon picking up O-5. I got a command job in APPLY to keep myself competitive for O-6, but after seeing the outside SELRES world, I wanted nothing to do w any O-6 jobs for as long as I’d have to do them to make it count (in my pension check). My time is barely worth 4 drills/month as it is, and it’s an even worse deal when you factor in extra fun like non pays and constantly having to stay connected. Being local is the only way I can see it ever making sense for me.

I saw plenty of the self-imposed additional work outside the DWE because I was in the command job, but at least it came with a lot of autonomy that’s not present with every command job. Not a lot of visibility with the Boss, and I got to assign my own AT. Life was good enough, and it helped me see that I didn’t want to keep playing a day longer than necessary.

I never really considered VTU because I liked TriCare, and I didn’t really trust the Navy to change anything that close to the end without screwing something up. Found a great flex drill unit for the last 8 months before retirement instead.

 

[snake020]

2) They cannot make you reschedule or travel for IDT if you are cross assigned. AT needs to be with your unit, but it's paid and travel paid for.

Fact is I've had two UMUIC units that would give admin Us if you did not travel when you were told to. Even if you're just trying to stay O-4 and hit 20, you can't avoid this nonsense with this approach at the risk of getting the boot.

 

[SynixMan]

Fact is I've had two UMUIC units that would give admin Us if you did not travel when you were told to. Even if you're just trying to stay O-4 and hit 20, you can't avoid this nonsense with this approach at the risk of getting the boot.

I'm assuming you weren't cross assigned? In that case, sure, they own you and your musters. As I said before, buyer beware picking a unit. But if travel was so arduous even with IDTT, you have the option of a TRUIC change to your most local NRC. Be it the RSU as a general holding tank, or any TRUIC at that NRC.

 

[Gatordev]

Fact is I've had two UMUIC units that would give admin Us if you did not travel when you were told to. Even if you're just trying to stay O-4 and hit 20, you can't avoid this nonsense with this approach at the risk of getting the boot.

I'm assuming you weren't cross assigned? In that case, sure, they own you and your musters. As I said before, buyer beware picking a unit. But if travel was so arduous even with IDTT, you have the option of a TRUIC change to your most local NRC. Be it the RSU as a general holding tank, or any TRUIC at that NRC.

This overall trend is a result of policy enforcement that was first put out ~2012-ish. The intent was to help the hardware units that were inundated with CAI sailors that never showed up, weren't qualified to do anything, but were protected by big-Navy Reserve because they were "owed" a billet with their rate.

SynixMan is correct, you can't force all IDTs to be done at the CAI unit, but you can create various requirements like quarterly mandatory weekends (or whatever your day of choice is). If this was too painful for the member, it would force them to apply to a different TRUIC, thus opening the billet for someone who actually wanted to work and be a productive member of the unit.

I always tried to use IDTT for this to make it easier for the CAI members to show up, but IDTT was always in low supply, so I'd save it for the very junior guys (E-3s and E-4s).

No doubt, there's no 100% solution to make everyone happy, but when you have a unit (depending on its size) that's 20-50% CAI with NONE of those 20-50% even having the basic apprenticeship qual (like Plane Captain), it gets very frustrating for the unit leadership when they're trying to support an operational fleet requirement.

 

[graham]

SynixMan is correct, you can't force all IDTs to be done at the CAI unit, but you can create various requirements like quarterly mandatory weekends (or whatever your day of choice is). If this was too painful for the member, it would force them to apply to a different TRUIC, thus opening the billet for someone who actually wanted to work and be a productive member of the unit.

(Long time lurker soon to be SELRES)

Interesting, this is consistent with what the recruiter is telling me, which I didn’t understand but makes sense in this context. I’m being told that would be Hawaii, sucks to be me…

All of this is great info, thanks guys.