Enhancing Identity Development At Senior Service Colleges

Senior Service Colleges (SSCs) impart three things as they prepare mid-career officers and civilians for entry into senior levels of leadership: skills, knowledge, and identity. The first two are givens in education. They are easy to define, easy to build a curriculum around, and easy to measure. However, when one considers many of the challenges and crises facing today’s senior leaders, they tend to fall in the third area—the attitudes and dispositions of the leaders putting the skills and knowledge into practice. We tend to treat identity development as a natural and self-evident result of gaining such skills and knowledge, but it is not. The military is one of several professions trying to solve the same problem of incorporating identity development into their educational curricula. While mentioned in the most recent Joint instruction, Officer Professional Military Education Policy (OPMEP), operationalizing identity into SSC curricula remains unspecified.