U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Kirsten Brandes

Traditional Professional Military Education, or PME, is mainly classroom-based, with the curriculum following a stair-step approach. Generally, courses introduce students to a range of subjects from military tactics, history, and strategy to political theory, psychology, and communication. However, given the relatively vast amount of objectives traditional PME courses must meet, there is little time for leaders to dive deeper into the subject matter and make layers of connections between the topics. Traditional PME is both necessary and valuable, but leaders must seek wisdom beyond the confines of DoD-mandated lessons. Our Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines expect us to relate to them personally and lead them professionally. Drawing on non-traditional sources of PME will make leaders more diverse in thought and thus more capable in action through structured courses, pleasure reading, and extra-curricular activity.

Structured Courses

It is true that military personnel spend ample time in formalized academic settings. However, leaders should consider enrolling in courses beyond those offered or required by the DoD. Into the category of structured courses I place anything with a pre-determined syllabus and desired end goal. The subject matter could be purely academic or it could be learning to play guitar or how to speak a new language. Structured courses across a range of topics (including those seemingly unrelated to your military duty) challenge the mind to solve unfamiliar puzzles. They provide an opportunity to bring a new skill to the workplace and increase the diversity of thought within your team, thus increasing creativity and the likelihood of success. Furthermore, formalized education outside the Defense Department offers a chance for failure and self- reflection without fear of career reprisal. A particularly good resource for free courses is www.edx.org. Through this platform, I recently completed a Columbia University class on the American Civil War, taught by Civil War historian, Eric Foner. The site offers thousands of courses on hundreds of subjects.  

Pleasure reading

Commanders or units often release reading lists of carefully selected, mostly benign texts. Unfortunately, this is not particularly helpful for leaders who operate in a complex world. It does not matter exactly what you read as long as you adhere to the following rule: there must be diversity in subject, genre, author, and opinion. To get the most out of your books, you may wish to read several texts on a particular subject at once, and perhaps round it out with a think tank study, and a podcast or Twitter threads on the same topic. As a secondary rule, leaders must include at least some children’s literature. I am not suggesting you replace Bellinger or Schake with Seuss or Saint-Exupéry. However, if you are unable to apply even a single passage of The Little Prince to any part of your leader development, perhaps you are not ready for Bellinger or Schake. 

Extra-curricular

Formal courses and pleasure reading enable leaders to relate better to their teams and more easily generate solutions to challenges. However, the physical world also is full of useful professional military education. If you have ever tended a garden, trained for a marathon, built a cabinet, or maintained a religious or spiritual practice, the likelihood is high that you drew upon lessons learned elsewhere. Perhaps you applied your planning skills to gardening, or time management to marathon training. The likelihood is also high that you learned new facts and skills while growing the garden or training for the marathon, which you most likely applied to your military duty without even thinking about it. Extra-curricular PME not only exposes leaders to new ideas, but it also offers innumerable opportunities to draw connections between seemingly unrelated scenarios. For example, a garden, some might argue, is a sort of war game. A gardener must strategize, plan, execute, and reflect while under constant threat from pests or adverse weather.  Gardeners furthermore must study light and moisture ratios throughout their battlespace and adjust actions according to the needs of each participant. Furthermore, the physical aspect of extra- curricular activity is one of its major benefits. Not only are leaders learning something new and connecting lessons to other parts of their lives, they are doing so while increasing both fitness and their own understanding of the relationship between self and body.

Go find your PME!

It is necessary for leaders to complete DoD-accredited training, but formal PME cannot and should not be relied upon solely for leader development. Military-led PME introduces members to the functions of their Service and its role across the interagency team. But it is not meant to give in-depth lessons on every subject a leader will need. Therefore, leaders must cultivate a love of learning in settings well beyond DoD-mandated PME. Our Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines need us to be capable of relating to their stories and expect us to arrive at every challenge with some level of knowledge on how to solve it. Formal professional military education is a good start, but in order to serve our teams and our nation best, we must also seek a diverse range of PME by other means and spend time increasing the capabilities of our teams by sharing what we have learned.

Victoria Thomas is a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from Seattle University and an M.A. in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University. Victoria is a senior pilot with several operational tours and combat deployments in C-130E/H and C-17A aircraft. She recently completed a joint staff tour with NATO. The statements herein are her own and do not represent any part of NATO or the US Government. Find her on Twitter at @ToriLeeThomas.