The Department of Defense announced today that a team from the University of Illinois at Chicago won the DoD National Case Study Competition. Students from more than two hundred and sixty colleges and universities participated in this nationwide competition.
The DoD National Case Study Competition challenged the creativity of America's students and gave them the opportunity to apply skills learned in an academic environment to real world DoD issues. Each team was required to develop a comprehensive recruiting strategy focused on identifying U.S. citizens who speak a foreign language and possess critical skills necessary to fulfill a variety of DoD civilian positions.
The top three teams made the final presentation of their case studies to a panel of DoD judges this morning at the Pentagon. The first runner-up was the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and the second runner-up was Cascade College, located in Portland, Oregon. Elements of all the case studies presented could be used in a large-scale national recruiting program, which will be implemented by the DoD in 2008-2009.
The DoD, which hires some 80,000 civilian employees every year, is striving to meet current recruiting challenges, including the need for a younger and more culturally diverse civilian workforce. This requires approaching recruiting and community outreach in a new way, one that targets recent college graduates through means that they are most comfortable using as they conduct their job searches. In one example of this, the winning submission from the University of Illinois at Chicago team included a prototype recruiting pitch that they posted to YouTube. The DoD National Case Study Competition is just one innovative marketing and recruitment initiative used to attract America’s best and brightest students to consider public service within the DoD.
