Future naval occupations determined to ensure readiness: Setting the Conditions for the Future Fleet
Press Release + Noah Note
The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) is entering a period of purposeful change. Change that is focused on ensuring our people, skills, and structures are ready for the fleet we will operate in the decades ahead.
New platforms, new combat systems, and increasingly complex operating environments demand a workforce that is agile, adaptable, and aligned to how we fight, operate, and sustain the fleet.
How We Got Here
To meet this challenge, the RCN undertook a comprehensive Occupation Analysis (OA). This work examined what sailors do at sea, ashore, and in training establishments, how technology has changed the nature of work, and where legacy occupation structures no longer reflect modern reality.
The outcome of that analysis was clear. While our people continue to deliver outstanding operational effect, the way our occupations are structured has not kept pace with evolving demands. In December, the OA presented Commander of the RCN with a course of action to transition nine existing RCN-managed occupations into thirteen modernized occupations. This change is designed to better align skills, training, career pathways, and workforce management, and to create a more resilient workforce that can grow alongside new capabilities, such as advanced combat systems and future classes of ships.
The following illustrates the redistribution of job tasks, duty areas, and responsibilities from legacy occupations to the newly designed occupations.
Where We Are Now
With this occupation change now endorsed, the Navy is moving into implementation planning. This phase focuses on translating analysis into an executable transition plan: One that is deliberate and carefully balances personnel, training, fleet readiness, and career progression.
At this stage, no individual changes are being taken. Instead, the Navy is deliberately sequencing the work to ensure transitions are coherent, fair, and operationally sound. This includes close coordination across formations, schools, fleet authorities, and headquarters.
What We’re Hearing
As implementation planning continues, the Navy is tracking the questions most frequently raised by sailors, which seem to be related to pay considerations and the protection of specialized skill sets. Pay implications for new occupations will be examined through established review processes at the appropriate stage of planning, with the intent of ensuring transparency and consistency across the workforce. Similarly, occupation transitions will be carefully sequenced and phased, considering specialization, time invested within skill streams, and operational requirements, to avoid unintended impacts.
What Comes Next
Over the coming months, the RCN will engage broadly to refine the implementation plan and address key considerations raised through stakeholder and formation engagement. Dedicated working groups and senior-level governance are being established to address key areas including personnel management, training, recruiting, pay and compensation, and required policy updates. As planning matures, additional information will be shared.
Noah Note: For those of you around in September/October, you might remember us discussing these changes. These aren't the only ones the Navy is making, and, indeed, each branch is going through a period of expanding or reforming existing occupations to better align with future platforms.
For the Navy, a lot is being pushed by the introduction of AEGIS. These changes will better align us with partners in the United States and Australia, and better set us to manage the incoming River-class Destroyers.
I don't think that's necessarily surprising. The jack-of-all-trades approach to things was fine for the Halifax-class era, but the introduction of newer, far more complex systems like AEGIS, and eventually the advanced systems coming with the future submarine fleet, means we need to look deeply at our current structure and ask if we can afford to generalize our technical trades.
Future platforms like the River-class naturally demand a highly compartmentalized, specialized workforce. Australia learnt this lesson years ago when they began transitioning to the Hobart-class destroyers, recognizing that it can be difficult and restrictive to plug a legacy workforce into the AEGIS ecosystem.
In that regard, the Royal Australian Navy completely overhauled its training and occupation categories, most notably introducing the exact Combat Systems Operator title that Canada is now adopting. The RCN is essentially pulling a page directly from the RAN playbook. If you're buying into the American combat ecosystem, you benefit by adopting their personnel structure to make it work.
Some might argue we should have taken the European route, like Spain or Norway, who adapted AEGIS to fit their existing crewing models without tearing up their traditional trades. But the RCN’s situation is different, for better or worse.
Regardless of anything going on, we still expect to be operating alongside our traditional partners, and want as easy a transition into the AEGIS environment as possible. This change will allow the RCN to better align and integrate with our 5E partners while also helping to streamline the training and certification pipeline onto these new platforms.
Some will be upset, naturally, but I understand the Navy's logic through all this. I had to be convinced, mind you, but after several months of talking around and getting the lecture on things, I can understand the value in an era of reform in adapting ourselves to what we're getting, and the value of creating a system that promotes further integration.