Torben said:
You say "what the hell is that?", but you really want the job, so you study up and learn enough of the lingo to get by.
That seems about right - the onus should probably fall to the applicant to be aware of all the details related to their job application. My question is: in this DND job posting situation, is that actually possible? After working fairly closely with PERS in the LOC ART REG for almost two years, no one has tipped me off to an army-to-English dictionary.
You'd be inclined to think, "Well, maybe in the interest of national security, definition of those abbreviations aren't readily available to the general public." But the more involved I get with the army, the more I get this sneaking suspicion that nobody really knows for sure what's going on with abbreviations. I mean, a commanding office sends you a memo with a somewhat ambiguous abbreviation - what do you do:
- risk looking stupid by asking?
- call out your officer on a trivial detail?
- try to figure it out the best you can, keep your head down, and go with the flow?
It's a fairly trivial detail at the end of the day, and to be fair, I haven't spent a lot of time looking for an army-to-English dictionary, so the answers might very well be apparent and easily at hand - I just haven't got around to making them a priority yet. I'm just looking out - as a matter of PR interests for the army's human resources, well, it's not like they take out ads in national papers advertising the specific positions they need at any given time is it (with the high turn-around, that'd be a lot of ads)? So you'd think it'd be in the army's interests to attract more flies with honey, and
then crush their spirits into soldiers
after they've signed on the line.