Greetings fellow Mountain Warrior!
Resident training covers courses that are in ATRRS, to include troop schools. I am not aware of any courses you can do here in Afghanistan but the best person to ask would be your Schools NCO. Given our geographical location, there won’t be many options, if any.
If you have a SOCAD agreement already in the GoArmyEd system, you are not required to go to an Education Center to enroll in classes. I don’t know if you can make it to FOB Fenty but there is an education center there which is located in the vicinity of the “Big Top Gym” behind the PX. The GoArmyEd website has all the information you need to enroll in civilian classes. You will need a Tuition Assistance form signed and uploaded to the site to be able to start enrolling in classes; your company commander is the approval authority.
Perhaps you don’t have a sufficient internet connection or a dedicated computer to do online classes. Have you ever considered converting your military training to civilian education? There is no set standard as to what military training counts towards civilian credits–it all depends on the institution that does the evaluation. There are multiple colleges that will do it, but the most common school is North Central Institute (NCI). NCI has a great accreditation reputation. Many Soldiers I know have gone through them. They do what is called a “Credit Inventory Evaluation” where they take your Army/American Council on Education Registry Transcript System (AARTS) Transcript and convert what they can into civilian education. It does come with a price but it may be worth it in the long run. For more information, visit the NCI website.
Lastly, since SSD3 is a computer based course, it only counts towards computer based training (correspondence) which you’ve already maxed out. It still wouldn’t hurt to complete them though as you never know what a civilian institution will credit you for it, should you choose to go that route.
Comments
SFC LeDay
My question is what of the Soldiers who have never registered prior to or after that directive. For instance, A SPC slated to go to WLC who well out of AIT preventing the Auto-Enrollment trigger and NOW cannot self enroll. That’s problem I’m coming across.
SPC Kimber
SFC, There was recently some changes made to the entire SSD process, to my understanding. As of right now, you can no longer enroll yourself into it, you have to be DA selected or sent by your schools NCO. For example, for SSD 3 you will not be enrolled into it until you are slotted to go to ALC. My question then is, will SSD 3 still count for promotion points for a SPC?
SGT NICK
Per SMA directive on 18 Dec 12, Soldier self-enrollment in Structured Self-Development (SSD) courses is no longer authorized.
All new enrollments in SSD will follow the auto-enrollment triggers and the NCOES pre-requisite sequencing shown in the table below. Link https://www.atrrs.army.mil/news.aspx#news108
Soldiers currently enrolled in or who have already completed SSD classes above and beyond what they are eligible to take per above guidance will not be dis-enrolled… they will be allowed to complete this training. However, HQDA policy guidance will be forthcoming that will establish rules governing whether this accelerated completion will continue to result in promotion points being awarded and how long accelerated completion of SSD courses will be acceptable to meet NCOES selection and attendance pre-requisites. Soldiers should understand clearly that accelerated completion of SSD under these guidelines does not mean they may not have to re-take the training in the future when they are slated to take the training and attend NCOES in due course.*
I was also unaware of this change and thank you for bringing it up to my attention. While I was deployed everyone was crunching all the SSD levels in while they had the down time. Now it seems that people might have to re-take the higher level courses of SSD 3 and 4. If you are a SPC and have completed SSD 1 then you already should be maxed out on promotion points (CC section) to SGT as it gives you 80 points upon completion.
In my opinion HQDA will make you re-take SSD 3 by the time you are ready to go to ALC, a travesty as these courses are painfully redundant and crammed with enough information as they stand now. As you might have recalled SSD 1 was just overhauled and if you didn’t complete it in time you were dis-enrolled and had to start all over.
Changes are likely to continue…
“Any opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Army or DOD.”