The New Promotion Point System

Promotion point UGH! The best part about being out of the army is I don't have the stress of getting promoted; Now I have the stress of getting my husband promoted. Yay! He came home today and said he finally got an appointment with his "wonderful" S-1. He also tells me that they are changing to promotion points system. "Great" I think. So he goes through his excellent "I Love Me" book that I made him to make sure he has everything. Come on I'm more organized and on top of things than he is. Who's he kidding. I'm up (2am) thinking how is this going to effect his points. "I" have been working really hard to motivate this man to get promoted. I make him work out with me when he gets home, I watch his eating 2 wks before a pt test. I tape him to see how much more I need to starve him (ha ha) I make him take every military class he can. I bug the hell out of him to do those STUPID correspondence courses (don't miss those). He's a crack shot so I don't have to worry about that but I do all of this because he refuses to do college I don't force him because college just isn't for everyone. This means I have to push him to do better in everything else if he wants to make up for the lack of civilian education.  I did a little research to see what kind of impact this change was going to have and I find that it's going to effect everyone a lot.

Well, the biggest thing is now the commander's points and board points are basically a Go and No go deal. That hurts because those were pretty much free points.

Next is awards, if it's a young soldier trying to fast track this will hurt. If you are a seasoned soldier you aquire Good Conduct Metals, ARCOMs, and AAMs like nobody's business. Escpecially if you deploy. You automatically get something for deploying and usually get an award for PCSing. Unless you get a company who doesn't like doing paperwork. :cough cough:

Military education I'm not too sure about yet. This still covers NCOES and ACCP but only courses, not sub-courses. Those receive 1 pt for every 5 hours. But DA 87 (certificates of training) I'm not to clear about. It says that DA 87's will only be accepted unless the course is formally listed in ATRRS or AR 350-1. Now when I checked AR 350-1 there have been some courses removed and added so your going to have to look those up.

Civilian Eduction: This is going to help some young soldiers out a lot since for SGT it has been dropped to 75. They have also changed the pt value per semester hour. What used to be 1.5pts for semester hour is now 1pt for semester hour. It's a smaller impact on the overall score.

Military Training: Here's the pick me up. They are now awarding points for combat experience.

2 pts for every month in combat. 30 pts max for SGT. 60 max for SSG

Of course APFT and Weapons Qual will be judged on a different scale.

I've been reading some comments on another website and have realized that this has a bigger impact than I thought. Some peoples points have dropped from 710 to 406. I hope that this also has an impact on the "skillport" certificates and that actual good, well trained, experienced soldiers will become NCOs. The army needs experienced NCOs. I used to absolutely hate it when there was a kid that fast tracked ahead of me because they had more college than I did and had no idea what was going on with anything. That just gave me more work. I had to do my work and make them look good because some how if they didn't know what was going on I would get in trouble for it. If they can't do their job why the hell did you promote them.  I hope this squashes that problem.

For more information on the new promotion points system check out : ncopromotionboard.com