Mission Support Training

Since the 1980, the Office of Human Resources, an integral component in the delivery of agency training and organizational development, has been responding to the needs of numerous program offices in support of employee training. With each fiscal year, the demand for support increased due to pressure on the agency to meet and address legislative and congressional mandates. It was determined that the Office of Development should set aside a portion of its budget for specific training that addressed predetermined criteria and develop some systematic and organized method of approach to functional training. This would insure that the agency be able to respond to its external constituency, train its employees and manage its dollars responsibly.

Functional training is defined as a specific set of activities which enables the employee to do his/her job more efficiently.

The criteria for support of functional training is based on the following:

Priority 2: Political expediency

Priority 3: Training and/or development activities required to assure that the required functional knowledge, skill and experience appropriately exist in the NASA work force.

The philosophy of functional training is to insure that agency-wide programs are developed for "turn-key" to NASA installations who will schedule future cost of such mandated programs in their budget request, provide "seed money" to conduct pilot programs and support functional office customers in the delivery of programs by consultants/vendors using off-the shelf, NASA-ized material.

Funding may be provided through allocation by requirement.

• The NASA Safety and Mission Assurance Professional Development Initiative (PDI)
• Acquisition Training Program
• NASA Administrator's Fellowship Program