Value of Defense Department, Industry Exchanges.

• Author: Chung, Wai Kwan
• Position: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY HORIZONS

At the heart of the defense industrial base is a critical workforce of Defense Department civilians and industry employees.

This dedicated group has committed their professional lives to ensuring the U.S. military remains the most advanced and capable force globally.

The National Defense Industrial Association and its Emerging Technologies Institute believes that for this workforce to continue to grow and develop, members must have opportunities to better understand how the department and industry maintain critical relationships and execute daily business with each other. In support of this concept, we are pleased to highlight ETI's participation in an exciting program, the Public-Private Talent Exchange, operated by Defense Acquisition University's office of human capital initiatives.

This program gives mid-career government and industry employees the opportunity to temporarily join either a government agency or an industry counterpart to learn and share knowledge about each other's business practices and processes.

Specifically, the program enables high-performing civilians to embed with a private company to learn how they develop and execute strategies and create new capabilities to meet requirements. This program is also open to employees of private companies to be placed in Defense Department program offices. These employees learn more about their customers, including how the department develops requirements and moves through the procurement and acquisition of goods and services.

I recently participated as a Public-Private Talent Exchange fellow with the NDIA's Emerging Technologies Institute. Prior to joining, most of what I knew about the association was through National Defense, which is widely circulated throughout department offices.

I knew even less about NDIA's new institute aside from the initial interviews with my future team members.

I didn't fully grasp just how the association helps support the overall defense community--from the planning and budgeting phase to fielding products--until coming on board.

After my orientation, I quickly learned that NDIA has a larger role than just the publisher of a magazine. I gained a better understanding of its capabilities in bringing together academia, industry and government stakeholders to solve defense challenges.

Throughout the next several months, I was tasked with a variety of projects ranging from policy guidance draft reports to supporting their many conferences and workshops to...