Talent Management Engagement Platform

Our first step toward a modern talent marketplace

The publication of Talent Management 2030 in November of 2021 was a watershed moment in the Marine Corps’ transition from Industrial Era human capital management to 21st-century talent management. While over the last three years there have been significant efforts at the headquarters level to realize these initiatives, there have only been a handful of tangible results for Marines. The development efforts toward creating a talent marketplace are one such result. These efforts include the award of contracts to prototype two industry-leading marketplace solutions in addition to the release of an internally developed marketplace called the Talent Management Engagement Platform (TMEP). The TMEP has already been released to approximately 30,000 enlisted Marines and officers and is in use for the fiscal year 2025 assignment season.

The TMEP will enable the Marine Corps to reimagine and enhance career management by increasing the transparency of the assignments process, improving the education of the individual Marine on career options and progression, and enhancing agency throughout the assignments process.   

What Is TMEP and How Is It a Marketplace?
A talent marketplace is a platform that enables job seekers to match their skillsets and interests with available job opportunities. Many marketplaces have familiar names, like LinkedIn or Zip Recruiter, which use advanced algorithms to match prospective employees with organizations that can reach out to begin negotiations. Harvard Business Review describes internal marketplaces like TMEP as having two forms.1 The first allows employees to search through job listings while managers search through candidate profiles and when interests align the process moves forward. In the second version, the platform automates the matching process, providing a curated list of recommended matches to the employees and managers. The TMEP is being designed to leverage the best of both internal marketplace types.

The current deployment of TMEP is like the first version of the internal marketplace. Marines can search through available billets to find opportunities that match their interests and desires. Simultaneously, monitors can review the Marines available for assignment and find options that align with their preferences. As the system matures and collects enough data, TMEP will implement machine learning techniques to include functionality more like the second version of the internal marketplace. Here the platform will use available data to align Marines’ skills, education, experience, and necessary career growth with the Marine Corps’ warfighting needs. Regardless of version, TMEP is being developed to support a modern internal talent marketplace rooted in three core principles: education, transparency, and agency.2  

The level of transparency provided by TMEP is unprecedented in the assignments process. Education and transparency often go together since education is nearly impossible without transparency of information. Before TMEP, Marines only had persistent access to their personal service record information, which includes their past assignments, but they lacked access to current and future assignment availability. The TMEP addresses this by providing Marines the ability to access a live update of the same assignment availability as the monitors. This level of transparency allows Marines to tailor their preferences based on current availability. The freedom to change their preference outside of the annual mover’s survey also allows Marines to adapt their career plan as their life circumstances change. The TMEP also increases transparency by providing an asynchronous and persistent communication platform for Marines and their monitors providing continuity even as monitors rotate out of the billet.  

In the current assignment process, a typical Marine has very little agency. They may complete a short survey and have a quick conversation with their monitor, but that is the extent of their input during the assignment process. Increasing the available information creates an opportunity for Marines to educate themselves and have more agency in their career progression.  

The TMEP is a significant step in the right direction to increase transparency and agency in the assignments process and further educate Marines on available career opportunities. While TMEP creates the opportunity for Marines to be more involved in the assignments process, it does not change the priority to meet the needs of the Marine Corps. 

What We See Today
Although most readers had not seen TMEP before the summer of 2024 when access was expanded to 12,000 enlisted Marines and 16,000 officers, the Marine Corps has been working on this effort for nearly two years. In that time Manpower and Reserve Affairs has conducted industry research, created an actionable vision, gathered user inputs, and began building that vision to meet those user requirements. This methodology, called user-centered design, is arguably one of the greatest changes and most impactful actions the Marine Corps has taken when it comes to IT modernization. The TMEP is being designed by and for the user: the Marines and their monitors. The version available today via Marine Online represents the most basic functionality and will serve as the foundation for future iterations still being shaped through Marines’ feedback and ideas.

Today, Marines can log onto TMEP and access the same service data that the monitors use to make assignment decisions. Officers can view their projected move date as well as when they can expect to be on a promotion board and in what zone. All Marines can see a consolidated graphic that captures key information for making career decisions including the ability to see how factors like age, time in service, rank, and children’s school grade levels line up over time to facilitate informed career planning (Figure 1).

Instead of being limited to an annual conversation with their monitor, Marines can send direct messages that are archived within the platform. The TMEP also provides Marines the capability to search through available assignments to make a more informed decision on assignment preferences. Marines can see the same availabilities that their monitor sees, including billet descriptions the commands can edit for their specific unit. Registering assignment preferences and communications with a monitor is now consolidated in the same platform monitors use to conduct assignments. This means no more jumping between systems reducing the potential to lose communications.  

What We’ll See Tomorrow
What we see today in TMEP is just the most basic functionality. What TMEP will look like in the future is up to the users of the platform. The TMEP leverages a user-centered design methodology, allowing Marines to inform the requirements and prioritization of future features. Users have already provided some great ideas that have resulted in functionality resident in the platform today.

In addition to improving user experience through feedback, the platform must incorporate talent-based criteria and decision tools. If we are to truly move to a talent-based marketplace, the next step for TMEP must be to identify required skills and talents by billet and register and validate the talent and skills of our Marines. One of the key ingredients in any talent marketplace is the mapping of skills to jobs and people, also known as a skills ontology. Without this mapping, matching Marines to billets will continue to rely on rank and MOS as the primary selection criteria. Mapping skills also clear the way for TMEP to start leveraging machine learning to automate and optimize the assignment process.  

In this instance, the intent of machine learning goes far beyond simple optimization. As the platform learns the various career paths Marines can take, the system will generate dynamic career path options and recommendations Marines can use as a roadmap to reach their career goals. Machine learning would be used to generate a draft list matching Marines to future vacancies optimized based on preferences, priority, and relevant skills. Machine learning will offer Marines a much clearer picture of their choices and how those choices impact their career progression and support monitors in meeting the needs of the Marine Corps.

Summary
Three years after the publication of Talent Management 2030, the marketplace effort is moving at full speed with two contracts and TMEP competing for the future of the Marine Corps’ talent management solution. Assignment processes are being evaluated for business improvement opportunities and the transition to a modern talent management system has begun. This move is long overdue but in no way an indictment of the old systems or the professionals who made it work for so long through sheer will and dedication. In a short time, TMEP made great strides to consolidate information, streamline workflows, and improve the efficiency of the overall assignments process with every additional feature added the Marine Corps’ talent marketplace brings the Commandant’s vision in Talent Management 2030 closer to reality.

>LtCol Peterson is currently serving as the Manpower and Reserve Affairs MITSM Portfolio Manager and Modernization Officer in the Manpower Information Systems Division, Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

>>Capt Figlioli is currently serving as the Talent Management Engagement Platform Product Owner and Project Officer in the Manpower Information Systems Division, Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

Notes

1. Gen David H. Berger, Talent Management 2030, (Washington DC: 2021).

2. Bo Cowgill et al., “How to Design an Internal Talent Marketplace,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2023, https://hbr.org/2023/05/how-to-design-an-internal-talent-marketplace.

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