Jack B. Smith
Lieutenant Commander Jack B. Smith
Operations Research Analyst at U.S. Coast Guard
Track: Business Administration
Investigating Coast Guard Investigators: A Discrete-Event Simulation Approach
Recent recruiting and retention challenges across the U.S. Coast Guard have been raising questions about its current workforce structure. Marine investigators in particular are a highly specialized subset of the officer corps who cannot be easily trained or hired from external sources. USCG leaders needed to understand the workforce shortages and bottlenecks in the career opportunities that marine investigators face. In this presentation, LCDR Jack Smith will discuss the approach by the Strategic Workforce Planning and HR Analytics Division of USCG Headquarters to assess the feasibility of the personnel system to train and retain these officers. He will describe the discrete-event simulation that combined elements of queuing theory, network graphs, and systems theory and the use of Monte Carlo methods for understanding the stochasticity of the models. He will take the audience from framing the business problem to creating the models to implementing decisions based on the models’ results.
