Bilingual staffing within the Canadian Armed Forces

Received 02 August 2016 Accepted 31 October 2016 Abstract—Many positions within the Canadian Armed Forces require incumbents who are proficient in both French and English. However, even with an excess of members that meet these requirements, the success rate for filling these positions with qualified members is low. This problem is examined analytically and it is argued that bilingual staffing will only be successful and efficient if language capabilities are a priority consideration during personnel posting. A detailed mathematical model is constructed that treats the problem of assigning bilingual members to bilingual positions from the point of view of the decision maker. A user-specified lower bound is proposed on the amount of information resources required by a decision maker to overcome staffing constraints while still filling all bilingual positions with a qualified incumbent. The number of bilingual members required to saturate the bound is deemed the optimal (or least costly) number of bilingual members that are required to fill a given number of bilingual positions.