It is not easy to quickly decipher military pay tables for us IMAs. In order to do some recent financial planning, I had to calculate my pay. I’m an O-4 with between 14 and 16 years of service. Here is what I did. IDTs You can find the official military pay tables from the DoD … Read more
One of the more frustrating things about the reserves: obscure codes like those above. I find it incredible how poor reserve support is, and unnecessary obscurity shouldn’t be tolerated. For those who wonder what these codes actually mean: Readiness Codes Full course title DOD IA DoD IAA CyberAwareness Challenge V2.0 (ZZ133098) FP Force Protection (ZZ133079) … Read more
Hello fellow IMA. My apologies to you. Life is not easy. In the civilian world, you work hard, play office politics and with a little luck you might get promoted. Not so in the reserves. Here your promotion depends heavily on your ability to decode a bunch of Air Force personnel jargon and to make … Read more
Here are some of the questions I had when starting as an IMA. How do you schedule IDTs? You have to be on a .mil domain or else you need to use arrows-r. utaps Who pays? IDTs and the 2-week annual tour are centrally funded. What are my work requirements? I am cat A with … Read more
UTAPS is terrible software. I wasted a half hour today going through the source code to figure out how to mark an IDT as complete. I have no idea how folks who don’t understand web codes can navigate this system. Why not include a button? Really?
This article has become incredibly popular. It was written six years ago at the start of my reserve career. Since then, I’ve had an amazing fun, rewarding and high-impact career. First, I’ve had amazing bosses, Shawn Barnes and Tim Kelly, who are both amazing leaders but understood the difficulty of balancing my day job with … Read more