In my 6 years as a junior Soldier, I was always told that I needed to work on my college and get my degree. It wasn’t just the Army and my first line supervisors telling me this, but it was my wife as well. I knew I needed to get it done at some point because I certainly didn’t, and still don’t, want to do the Army forever so I needed to get a good set of skills and education for my future. Luckily, I had a lot of college done before the Army, so what I needed to do most was get those credits transferred somewhere I would get accepted to, and get the Army to pay for it.
It was easy for me to recall that in the recruiting station, at MEPS, at Basic Combat Training, at DLI, and at every unit I in-processed to, that there was tuition assistance (TA) that would pay for this. I needed to find a way to get my hands on this money! I was about to make my NCOs proud, but on the other hand, I was going to make my wife happy and accomplish some of my personal goals. I persevered what can be a daunting and frustrating process of getting the Army to pay you to go to school, and made it work.
This is not the case with a lot of junior Soldiers. Most juniors fall into one of two categories. In the first category, there are the Soldiers who came to the Army right out of high school and either don’t want to do college, don’t know what they want to go to college for, want to go to college after the Army, or just want to make the Army a career and don’t feel they need college. All of this is perfectly fine and well. While college, to me, is great for personal growth and securing the idea of what I think a good future is, not everyone holds these same values. The second group of people who come to the Army with a degree and didn’t choose the office route. These people have either completed as much college as they want or are perhaps looking to get the GI Bill to help fund a master’s degree in something down the road.
In these groups of Soldiers, if you ever ask them what their education plans are, the honest ones will likely tell you that they plan on using their GI Bill when they get out, and the dishonest ones will also say they plan on using their GI Bill when they get out. Why does no one ever seem to talk about TA? It’s briefed plenty. Why don’t people want to use it? Ask the Soldiers. You know what the most common response is? “I just don’t have time sarn’t”, or “We go to the field too much”. These two reasons, while more or less valid, can account for a lot of the Soldiers who don’t pursue TA and work on their degree while serving their country, but what about those who do try and go this route and make something happen? They get abused by the system.
As often as it is joked about, most Army stuff truly does suck and it is one of the perils of all the Army gear, tools, equipment, and services being built, maintained, and operated by the lowest bidder. The Army Education program and TA is no different. From the the poorly developed website, to the lack of interoperability of its components and many of the necessary features being spread out across different sites with different security protocols and certificate needs, the platform itself is horrible. When you combine that with the program being staffed by people who carry the far to common “Soldiers are used to being treated poorly by drill sergeants, so I can treat them poorly too” mentality of a majority of Department of Army Civilians in IMCOM, there isn’t even anywhere you can go to get help. If I am a Soldier looking into using the Army to help me get my education while I am serving purely because my NCO tells me I have to, the whole thing will wind up in disaster. A Soldier in this situation will most likely become too frustrated with the red tape involved in this process and all its intricacies that they would rather take the negative counseling than deal with it anymore. I mean, they didn’t want to go to school in the first place anyways. It certainly doesn’t help that a majority of the NCOs who are telling juniors to get to work on college and use TA likely haven’t done the process either and can’t offer advice. But why should they? They are NCOs. They got there without a degree so now they can just give their subordinates the same grief they got as a junior and perpetuate a toxic cycle. But that is another paper for another time; let’s get back to talking about TA and the Army Education System.
In addition to the Soldiers who try to use TA and quit because of the flawed system, there are also Soldiers who are intrinsically motivated and are going to make this process work. A lot of them, and I have seen this in many Soldiers, will get so fed up with the system slowing down the progress they want to make and causing them to miss enrollment deadlines that they just pay for the college out of pocket. This means that some very junior Soldiers have to weigh using their E-1, 2, 3, or 4 paychecks to go to school instead of feed their family. If they choose family, then they are going to lose out on schooling because the process makes anyone want to give up. If they choose school, the family is going to have a lot of negative financial impact.
So far, I have talked a lot about the fact that there is a problem with TA and that it puts a lot of Soldiers off, but you may be wondering just how bad is the issue? Let me take you on a guided journey of my last 48 hours as I tried to figure out how to navigate the systems put in place to allow Soldiers to earn professional certifications that the Army will pay for. This program is called credentialing assistance (CA) and while you can use TA and CA independently, CA does pull from the same pool of funds that Soldiers are allotted for TA.
I’m a tech guy. I got my undergrad in GIS, and my masters in IT with a focus in Data Analytics and Software Development. I am clearly big on information technology and intend to make that a big part of my future. For a majority of people whether they are deciding if maybe an IT career is for them, or perhaps trying to see what route they want to take in the IT world, industry certifications go a long way to helping you get your foot in the industry’s door. I may show up to an interview with a solid military background and give people my word that in addition to my collection of tools and software I have written and provided as examples, that I have an in-depth knowledge of IT infrastructure. They will take this word, but if someone shows up with similar experience and a certificate to back up their knowledge, they will get the job over me far more often than not.
I need to get a cert. The common springboard into the IT field is the CompTIA A+ certification. This is basically your entry level IT certification which qualifies you to do some pretty basic stuff. I need to get this.
I knew through my Army background that there was this tool that no one really ever uses called Credentialing Opportunities On-Line (COOL). I had first explored this website shortly after reclassing from 35P to 35G because I love my job, plan to make it a career, and wanted to see where the industry wanted me to focus my training. What I found was mostly expected but was also very weird. Most of the certifications were different ESRI certifications, and as the world leader in GIS products, this made sense. What didn’t make sense that was suggested for 35Gs and is still recommended on their site as the first thing that indicates problems with this is a three-step certification to become a Search and Rescue Crew Leader. I can’t think of any 35Gs I know that are in a unit that flies around in helicopters and rescues people from the wilderness as this certification talks about on their webpage. The only reason I can see this being deemed as a 35G related certification is that “Search and Rescue” and “Synthetic Aperture Radar” are both abbreviated as SAR, but only the radar technology is something GEOINT Soldiers actually use. Weird recommendation.
But I digress. Originally the Army would only pay for the certifications that it deemed were related to your job. This changed in 2019 and now any Soldier could get any certification or credential that the Army will pay for that is offered to any MOS. This meant that I could now go out and have the Army pay for my CompTIA A+ certification even though it isn’t listed as a 35G credential (though I would argue it is many times more useful to my job that search and rescue). Thus, my first step was to Google “Army COOL” and see what I needed to do to make this happen.
This is where the whole journey went completely off the rails and the process became overwhelmingly complicated, plagued by technology issues, and an overall pain. On the homepage for COOL I found a link to the 4-step process to getting a credential. The first step was to learn about CA. I got some basic facts about the program and was excited this would work for me. The second step was to select the credential I wanted. That’s an easy step. I knew what I wanted because that’s why I was here in the first place. This is where it gets rough. Step 4 was to take the exam, which seemed pretty straightforward, so my focus was all on Step 3: Apply for CA.
I clicked the link to learn more about how to get this process started. It tells me the whole process is actually on GoArmyEd. At this point I begin to wonder why the COOL website even exists. Is it really an entire webpage that taxpayers paid for that just points to GoArmyEd? That is what it seems like. All the functionality of COOL could be easily incorporated into GoArmyEd, and a lot of the process could be streamlined.
Once I got to GoArmyEd, I needed to log in. This shouldn’t be an issue because I did use some TA a few years back to wrap up my undergrad. The first issues came with the CAC log-in. Each time I tried to log in, I was met with server errors. This issue persisted across multiple browsers, using different certificates, and even using a VPN to try and access the site from an American IP (I am station in Korea). It never worked. I tried the forgot username and password link. This link needed my last five digits of my SSN and my birthdate to locate my record. This would work. But it didn’t. I was told that I do not have an account. Things are starting to look off. I head back to the GoArmyEd homepage and see a reactive account link. I try that, and from here it told me that my account was deactivated because I separated from the service. This is another major red flag for the system here. I am 100% still in the Army. I fill out the forms for reactivation, and it tells me that my SSN is wrong and needs to be fixed. That seems like a minor issue, but when I go to verify it, my SSN is in a read only text field and is populated by the system. I can’t fix it. If anyone got it wrong, it is the GoArmyEd system. This makes for another huge red flag as apparently, PII is not being properly stored and maintained. I thought maybe it was the browser having issues, tried on many other browsers and got the same lack of results.
A quick phone call to the GoArmyEd help desk got the issue squared away but presented another major red flag. This “separation from service” is a common issue. How many people’s accounts are being deactivated for no longer being in the Army, when they are still very much in the Army? The young lady on the phone was a great help and got me logged into GoArmyEd. That part of the workflow was now complete.
My next step was to fill out the CA request form and Soldier Statement of Understanding (SOU). This should be simple. The COOL webpage told me that these were on GoArmyEd. I scoured every link on the homepage, every link on the site map, and poured over every page of the website; these documents were not present. Major red flags. I did find one link that looked promising titled “Credentialing”. I clicked this link and was taken back to the very page at COOL that started this whole process. I was in an indefinite loop of no results. Another red flag. Where are these forms!?
Eventually, I was able to locate an old training PowerPoint that had been put together by someone involved in the roll out of credentialing assistance, and it showed me that the CA form were in fact on the GoArmyEd website, however they were not on their own web page. The only way to access these forms was to open a help desk ticket and select “Credentialing Assistance” as what you need help for. For a service like GoArmyEd who just handles TA and CA, it’s a little embarrassing that CA is just treated as an afterthought and gets no pages of its own, or anything of its own really, and is just a help desk ticket. Whatever though, I click to create the helpdesk ticket and found the two forms I needed to fill out.
I downloaded the forms and got to work filling them out. These were pretty self-explanatory and were probably the most straightforward part of the entire process. The next step was to go back and attach them to the helpdesk ticket. And we find another problem. I have two forms to submit, and the help desk only accepts one file. So now, not even the jenky workaround solution for applying for CA even works. Well, let’s submit the request first, that seems pretty important. I submit it no problem. At this point, I see you can submit one file per communication on the ticket, so I make a second submission and attached my other file to it. Should be done!
And now I have waited. For over 3 weeks I have waited with no feedback whatsoever. I will continue to wait, I suppose, to get the money for my credentials, but the longer the wait goes, and the longer I let the stress of wondering when I will get to take my exam weight on me, but I guess that’s the Army.
This is why Soldiers don’t do education. As someone unmotivated to do college, with all the other ways in which the Army wastes my time, why would I want to spend this much time to sign up for something else that is going to take up all my time – just because my NCO told me to? I’m not. If I am someone who really does want to do college however, I may be relatively inclined to just pay for it myself. Even worse for retention, I may also be inclined to just give up on the Army and ride my time out until ETS and then go to school. It seems to be like losing a Soldier passionate about education is a bad thing for the Army and just promotes an uneducated force, but this is the situation we are finding ourselves in time and time again.
Finally, we need to answer the question about how we can actually encourage Soldiers to get their education while serving, and how we can make the process not only more streamlined, but something that isn’t seen as a burden to the Soldiers. This type of change has to come from the top and must encompass nearly every aspect of the current Army education and GoArmyEd system.
First, the staff at the education centers need to actually give a single ounce of care about the Soldier that come in. Far too many times either fellow servicemembers or I are greeting with negative attitudes and belittled by these people. The only explanation is that because we are rough and touch Soldiers that we should like being treated like shit. This is patently false and is very off-putting.
Second, the Army needs to re-evaluate how this entire education system is supposed to operate. On one hand, we have the entirely broken and terribly organized GoArmyEd that needs a complete redesign. It is a website that looks like some General’s grandson made for a middle school project that the General used to get an OER bullet from another technologically illiterate General. The Army needs to part with some of their money and design a webpage that works. This may be a long shot because the Army is hiding education benefits behind this atrocity so that they don’t have to actually spend that money either. On the other hand, the whole COOL website needs to be closed down. If all the applying for credentialing is to be done on GoArmyEd, then what is the purpose of COOL? Either move the CA portions of GoArmyEd to COOL or shut COOL down. It serves absolutely no purpose and just adds another layer of confusion.
Finally, and probably easiest, is to just update both of these terrible sites with relevant information. Throughout this whole ordeal, all I did was follow the instructions which kept me in a never ending redirect loop between the two pages. It was by forging my own path and leaving the instructions that I finally got what I needed. This should not be that difficult.