Development of a physical employment standard for a branch of the UK military

Abstract

A Physical Employment Standard (PES) was developed for the British Royal Air Force Regiment (RAF Regt). Twenty-nine RAF Regt personnel completed eight critical tasks wearing Combat Equipment Fighting Order (31.5 kg) while being monitored for physical and perceptual effort. A PES was developed using task simulations, measured on 61 incumbents. The resultant PES consists of: 1) a battlefield test involving task simulations: single lift and point-of-entry (psss/fail); timed elements (react to effective enemy fire and crawl) set at 95th performance percentile; casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) casualty drag and CASEVAC simulated stretcher carry completed without stopping. 2) a Multi Stage Fitness Test level 9.10 to assess aerobic fitness to complete a tactical advance to battle. The task-based PES should ensure RAF Regt personnel have a baseline level of fitness to perform and withstand the physical demands of critical tasks to at least a minimum acceptable standard.

Practitioner summary: A Physical Employment Standard (PES) was developed for the British RAF Regiment by measuring the physiological demands of critical tasks on a representative cohort of incumbent personnel. A task-based PES should ensure that only those candidates, irrespective of gender, race or disability, with the necessary physical attributes to succeed in training and beyond, are selected.

Keywords:

• Critical tasks
• physiological demands
• direct task simulations
• minimum standard
• method of best practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to like to thank RAF Honington for allowing use of their facilities and to all the volunteers from the RAF Regt who took part in the study. We owe special thanks to Sqn Ldr Slark-Hollis who facilitated the data collection.

Notes

1 The combined experience of the SMEs met the criteria suggested by Blacklock et al. 2015.

2 The only task that changed, due to SME feedback from Phase 1 was the carry diatance of the jerry can, changed from 250 m to 50 m.