Is your training service resilient and postured to support organisational sustainment?

ABSTRACT

Organisations increasingly invest in resilience to better deal with future uncertainties and change. An organisation’s training service is one of the critical ingredients of this effort. However, its role in posturing organisational sustainment in a volatile operational environment and organisational resilience-building effort is rarely considered in its own right and often overlooked. This paper reports developing, verifying, and validating a new survey instrument for assessing the resilience performance of the organisation’s training systems. The instrument is based on six resilience attributes juxtaposing organisational ability and capacity to allow management to compare its resilience expectations with the actual resilience and make trade- off decisions. The efficacy of the training service policy is also considered to enable appropriate attribution of the survey findings to the training policy issues or its poor implementation. The survey incorporated a robust mixed-method, multi-attribute and multi- perspective approach that has been applied extensively with 1,403 respondents from more than 20 military training establishments over three years. This research provides organisational leadership with a focused diagnostic instrument in their training aspects’ performance against resilience metrics, where such training aspects are often a dynamic enabler for change and, thus, overall organisational sustainability and evolutionary competitiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Organisational resilience
• training system
• resilience measurement
• survey development
• survey verification and validation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14488388.2024.2307083.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Victoria Jnitova

Victoria Jnitova is the RAN Training Systems officer. She completed her PhD in Jun 2023. She also has Master Degrees in Systems Engineering, Business and project Management. This paper is a manifestation of her PhD research written in collaboration with the Defence and Academia, both Aus. and international. It amalgamates the authors’ combine knowledge and application of multi-disciplinary tools to develop an innovative approach to organisational resilience measuring.

Keith Joiner

Dr. Joiner is a senior lecturer and researcher at the University of New South Wales, in Canberra. His degrees include aeronautical engineering, a Master of Aerospace Systems Engineering with distinction through Loughborough University, a Ph.D. in Calculus Education, and a Master of Management. He has vast experience in the fields of test and evaluation, system design, project management, cyber security, and others. The last position of his 30 years Defence career as Director General of Australia’s Test and Evaluation culminated in the award of a Conspicuous Service Cross.

Adrian Xavier

Adrian Xavier was born in Singapore and joined the Singapore Air Force (RSAF) from school, in 1988. He left Singapore in 2003, after his last tour at Hill AFB, Utah, USA as the RSAF Senior National Representative for the Peace Carvin IV project - the F-16 Block 52+ FMS acquisition project with the USAF and Lockheed Martin. Prior to that he was Officer Commanding in Tengah Air Base, for the A4, E2C and F-16 fleet, overseeing maintenance and engineering issues at Ordinary, Intermediate and Depot Levels. He later went on to join the APS, as Air Force Training Group’s – Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Director Training Governance in 2010. The position was re-named to Director Strategy, Performance & Governance in January 2018. CPCAPT Xavier graduated from the University of Bristol, UK with a BEng (Hons) in 1995 and has a Masters in Aeronautical Science (MSc) from USA and a Masters in Systems Engineering with University of New South Wales (UNSW) at ADFA.

Elizabeth Chang

Professor Chang leads the ICT Big Data research in the Griffith University, Queensland. She also leads research groups targeting the key issues in Logistics ICT, Defence Logistics and Sustainment, Big Data Management, Predictive Analytics, Cyber-Physical Systems, Trust, Security, Risk and Privacy. She has delivered over 50 Keynote/Plenary speeches at major IEEE Conferences in the areas of Semantics, Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Data Quality, etc. She has published 7 authored books, over 500 international journal papers and conference papers with an H-Index of 47 (Google Scholar) and over 12,000 citations.

Timothy Ferris

Dr. Ferris is an Associate Professor and researcher of Systems Engineering for Defence Capability Centre of Excellence for Complex Systems at Cranfield University since 2015. He holds B. E. Hons, Electrical and electronic, from the University of Adelaide; B.Th., from Flinders University; B. Litt. Hons., from Deakin University; Grad. Cert. Ed., in Higher Education from the Queensland University of Technology; PhD from University of South Australia (UniSA). He lectured at UniSA in systems and electronic engineering and worked as an engineer in power line design with Electricity Trust of South Australia.

Fanny Camelia

Dr. Camelia is a Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Systems and Technology Management, Cranfield University. She has conducted research in the areas of systems thinking, systems engineering and other systems methodologies to support the design, development, and management of complex system. She actively engaged in building multidisciplinary collaboration with research communities in South East Asia (funded by Cranfield GCRF project on ‘A system of systems approach to building community disaster resilience: Cutting-edge technologies for situational awareness and decision support) and building a new knowledge exchange hub for enabling knowledge exchange and progressing research in future aviation security technologies.