Many of the responses to my post lead me back to my original statement...we'll never "fix" the NNPP because the prevailing attitude is "I did it, so it must not be screwed up."
Let's back up a bit: I passed power school without having to be put on extra hours at all. I have qualified everything early. I am not fledgling along, nor am I going to "tap" because I think the program is too hard. So some of you can stop responding to my posts as if I'm someone whining about struggling in a program that I think is too hard and I need to just "suck it up" -- that's not the case. This is a thread about how you would fix the NNPP, and I am posting about things I think are silly in the community -- things that, ultimately, drive people away.
I make reference to private companies because I have worked for 3 major companies prior to coming into the Navy. None of them had a physical fitness standard -- in fact, I can assure you I was in the top 10% of height/weight at all of them. Despite this fact, all of them either had a gym on the premises for employees to use free of charge or provided a membership to a nearby gym. Amazing.
I'm glad that you think being fit is a LIFE standard. Great. Some people don't agree with you. But the fact is, Navy says that fitness is a NAVY standard, so the NAVY should be providing time to work out. And it does in other communities outside the nuke world.
You say that you can't compare life in the Navy to a career in the private sector. That has some merit, but the fact of the matter is that the Navy is in competition with these organizations for workers. Companies have realized some time ago that high turnover costs a lot of money, so they took measures to make sure people felt taken care of at their jobs. Where the Navy is different is that the entire system relies on turnover and promotion, but the Navy still needs to retain enough experienced Sailors to man the experienced billets. That is where the Navy is failing.
I have friends in multiple different Naval communities. Some of them (ie, Aviation), actually still drop people for poor performance because they have enough people to fill billets. When I say poor performance, I mean getting below 90% on exams, not below 62% where the nuke community sets the bar. Yet they manage to keep high standards without making people's lives consumed with work. Amazingly, they have a lot higher retention than the nuke community, too. Imagine that. Other communities, even on submarines, manage to keep the boat going to sea in-port without working inordinate amount of hours. There are times where long hours and hard work is called for, and the Sailors rise to the occasion...for nukes, there is nothing but long hours and hard work. Does it really have to be like that? Probably not, but apparently there's no reason to think about how to make it better because you did it back in the day, so everyone else should just suck it up. Everything is relative, and if you factor in the amount a nuke works compared to other rates, they are one of the lowest paid communities in the Navy.
Ah, so we should just raise the standard, eh? Well, right now you'd need to decommission 3 boats in order to make the rest of the fleet at manning. Now you want to raise the standard when people aren't attracted to the community in the first place. A $2 billion asset that can't go to sea and the salary for all those Sailors is a lot bigger drain on your tax dollars than a baby nuke who doesn't work 120 hours a week to get a 65% on an exam because that's the way you did it. That method is resulting in a steady supply of Sailors who don't know enough about their rate in order to qualify in a timely fashion, and there really isn't time in the fleet between maintenance, mandatory training, and other random crap for them to play catch-up, so they end up qualifying with a very minimal amount of knowledge and the answer is just make the Chief be on station to watch him do everything on watch for the first couple of months. Apparently, though, that's a lot less wasteful than slowing down the program and making sure they actually know something.
But the training pipeline isn't the only problem. Once Sailors get to the fleet and get qualified, they will be introduced to one of many nuclear monitoring programs. At first, it doesn't seem so bad. Then one day some LCDR or CDR from off-hull will tell someone they did something wrong. Roger. They change the process and move on. Then another LCDR or CDR from off-hull comes down and says the way the other guy said to do it is wrong, and they should go back to what they were doing before. This process repeats itself ad-nauseum until everyone involved becomes frustrated and bitter. This is because a monitor is only perceived as effective if he finds deficiencies, and there's only so much you can find without making stuff up when Sailors are inserting a voltmeter into a panel and taking readings. It also doesn't help that most monitors have never done the maintenance themselves to begin with. The fact that many Sailors don't feel trusted to do their jobs without someone directly watching, and then that person makes comments that result in extra work to change a process they've been doing for years without incident or problems, turns a lot of people off to reenlisting. I would never, ever recommend ELT to anyone based on this fact alone. Everything you do will always be wrong when someone is watching, someone will watch you more frequently than anyone else, and what was wrong yesterday is right today and wrong tomorrow. Despite the fact that these monitoring programs have questionable usefulness, they keep expanding.
There is also the fact that Sailors spend an inordinate amount of time waiting to get stuff done. Since all work has to go through a watch officer, and there is only 1 watch officer to handle every job that has to get started, it creates a backlog. A job that takes 10 minutes to do easily turns into an hour and a half when you factor in writing a WAF, writing a tagout, getting the tagout approved, hanging the tagout, opening the WAF, setting up an electrical safety area to do dead checks, doing the dead checks, then you get to do the work. All of those stages require permission from the watch officer, and you're not the only person trying to get work done. This leads to a lot of frustration for someone who just wants to do his job so that he can go home to see his wife and kids in port or move onto the next thing to work on underway so they can hit the rack. How do you fix this part? I don't really know... if you got rid of it entirely, you run into the chance that people will do conflicting maintenance that damages equipment.
So we are where we are, and it'll pretty much stay this way until we have a reactor accident or another major Naval war.
I know of far more people who do not make it through the program due to underage drinking than who failed math...
So clearly the problem is the age of the applicant, not the Navy, and to a greater extent, America's ridiculous policy toward alcohol.
You would also be circumventing one of the main reason people join the Navy -- to pay for college. Now you're cutting the nuke community out from all those people.