Fleet Growth, Looking Inward

[jp Gifford]

The Idea being that we need to grow, with the Advertising the hunt continues for new Fleet members. Many people wander to the PF site looking for a new home. Some good, unfortunately some not so good. I just thought I would toss out a possible strategy that may be considered. FACT: My sim in PF has Eight CO's on the manifest...LOL It's a wonder we even post at all!

All our current sim CO's begin searching and training Executive officers who have no commands in the Fleet. I'm sure that the process would be much better for us in the long run. The benefit would be a actual brief training period that would allow the XO to learn to run a sim by On the job training [OJT]. Many commanding officers have XO's that already have a command. Having this open EX position on your sim allows you to bring in another potential CO to the Fleet once his training through the Academy is complete and they have spent some time getting out and establishing themselves in the Fleet as an XO training for a command position.

I've spent a bit of time this week looking at several Fleets. I've seen Fleets recruiting for CO's, and ad's telling CO's to bring their sims into a Fleet... However,Independent sims out there leave a Fleet and hop around from Fleet to Fleet. A Fleet is as strong as It's core of CO's, TGCO's,TFCO's. Building a strong core of Officers I believe is the vital element to building a strong organization. These are people we know and have brought up and trained with our own CO's and have vested time with us. These XO's are proven, and had the opportunity to meet more people in our Fleet, share Ideas and hence be more successful in their own commands.

Some of our Fleet members just like to write and not command. And that has to be respected as those members of our Fleet are vital to the sims they are on. And I'm not advocating the Fleet Academy be minimized at all. I have actually spent the last Thirty Days joining a new Character to Four Fleets. Two of the characters were never contacted after the generated message welcoming them to the fleet. Of the Two that were contacted Both are in those Fleet Academies and have had No contact from an instructor at all.. So that tells me that the staff, {all Thirteen, in one Fleet} just don't care or have been given the position as no one else would take it.

Another observation is a Fleet full of sims, with vessels of characters without Bio's, less than Ten posts a Month and a dead inbox...Fleet Fail.

That being said I will try something new.. My current XO will be leaving my sim soon for a RL military commitment. He will be unable to join us here at PF as a CO. At that point that position will be open to a fleet member who has the desire to command a vessel here in PF and trained by myself and my crew. Hopefully that will give the new XO time to attend the academy, meet some great people and start to seriously preparing to run a sim of his or her own. Given the proper support of the Fleet we will have another sim that's productive and not just an empty mailbox floating around.

I got forth searching for an Executive officer...wish me luck.

[Williams]

Sometimes I've found that an XO who isn't a CO can be the best kind of XO - my first sim has been running for nearly 5 years now, most of which have been under the careful gaze of the same XO - though unfortunately he doesn't have the wish to take a command of his own, he's certainly learnt enough by now to be able to. Conversely, I've found on the Endeavour that I've... well, not had to 'settle', since I'm very happy with my XO there, but more that having a friend and long-term simming colleague as my XO there after a succession of other XOs provided the most stability for the sim at the time that it needed it most, and it just so happened that that person already held a command of his own.

I'd certainly advocate the process for COs that want to and feel they can do the above; it would certainly help the fleet, and as I started with, it can also be very beneficial to your own sim. I wouldn't make it overall policy or fleet guidance though; sometimes a sim or a CO might need someone experienced in the 2nd slot

[Thompson]

My first Xo had absolutely no idea about trek or simming. A year later now and he is still writing strong and still with me. Why did I pick a total novice? Simply put because I can trust him and I know if something happens he'd make sure that the simm moved into it's next stage correctly.

[JasmineSomers]

If you want to put something up please take a looksee at this:

http://www.freewebs.com/paulsinfocentre ... syrpgs.htm

It does have visitors to it and its on most Search engines, but here is what I used for my infocentre site.

http://freewebsubmission.com/

This might help too!!