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MSC Mentorship

Written by BG Dennis Doyle on 12-Oct-2012 | 3 Comments

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Greetings, fellow MSC Officers.

We know that developing mentoring opportunities, especially for our junior officers, has always been challenging. Due to the diversity of our Corps, it can be difficult to find or reach a solid MSC mentor, especially when our junior officers are assigned to “line” units. Often times, there are only one or two MSC officers in the entire Battalion. With that being said, I encourage our MSC officers to utilize one of the Army’s newest tools: the Army Career Tracker (ACT) located at https://actnow.army.mil. The ACT is an easy-to-use interface that allows anyone to search and request a mentor within the MSC. It allows you to search by AOC/MOS, rank, or name. In fact, when you initially log onto the site, you are required to search for and request a mentor. This allows a junior officer to establish a relationship with one or multiple senior mentors of various AOCs.

With this in mind, I encourage senior leaders to make the time to accept and embrace any mentorship requests that come in from the field. I also encourage junior leaders to be proactive and reach out to mentors through ACT. With continued advancements in technology, programs like ACT make it possible to reach and mentor our officers anywhere in the world. Continue to utilize your Silver Caduceus Societies and day-to-day interactions to provide mentorship, but I highly recommend that you put the ACT in your toolkit, as well.

I would like everyone to login to ACT, find a mentor, and become a mentor. Play with the program and provide me your feedback. I look forward to your comments.

Serving to Heal… Honored to Serve!

Respectfully,

COL Delk, Medical Service CSBPO

for BG Dennis D. Doyle, 17th Medical Service Corps Chief

Comments For This Post

Sidney M Cobb, Jr on 12-Nov-2012
Sir,

I think that the Army Career Tracker is a great idea and will serve as a beneficial tool for our Corps in attempts to foster mentorship and link the right mentor with mentee. While I believe personal recommendations and interactions will still spur officers to seek out mentors by-name, this tracker will help bridge and facilitate the ease of that search. The ability to pull up training and assignment information will also allow the mentor to better assist the mentee in developing those key personal and professional goals and having an virtual record of them. Great tool.

Sidney M. Cobb, Jr., MAJ, MS Student, Command and General Staff College, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center Fort Belvoir, VA "The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the US Government."

CPT Dwayne M. Williams on 26-Oct-2012
Sir,

Great post! Finding and maintaining contact with a mentor can be very challenging. It becomes especially difficult with high OPTEMPO and continuous relocation. With so few of us in certain units, we must stay abreast of the many technological resources such as the ACT. I use outlook on my home computer and take notes of the interactions I have had with the "good ones". This provides me a resource and a reference for future use. Building and maintaining your network is paramount.

CPT DMW 47th CSH

LTC Soo Lee Davis on 14-Oct-2012
Nothing beats a face-to-face mentorship discussion, but many of our junior MSC officers are assigned to units where there may be only a few MSC officers and finding an MSC mentor is tough to do. ACT facilitates that, as well as facilitates communicating with a mentor from a previous assignment that is geographically separated now. A good tool -- will take some time to flesh out the information managed in the tool. Any plans for it to synch up with personnel systems to populate that data automatically (with the user's permission)?

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