Absolutely. To achieve my rank, we effectively spend about four years in professional military education, that is, courses and development. We like to pride ourselves that we have a continuous learning environment. We have to learn something new every day. As members of one of the four classical professions, we have a responsibility within that subset to improve ourselves, our knowledge, on a daily basis.
If you look back at slide 1, it talks about institutional training, foundation training, and high-readiness training. That doesn't mean that everybody in the Canadian Forces, or the army in particular, is doing the same thing at the same time. There are people at different stages all the way through to heading out the door on operations and preparedness, but we're always taking individuals at various levels of training. Even courses in Gagetown have a component that would be more accurately framed as military education—the history, the traditions, the ethos, ethics. We build up that body of knowledge. We move through a system where we assign development period levels to each officer and each soldier as they move through DP1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. We have specific goals assigned, and all of this is a subset of the Canadian Forces framework.
Going back to some of the lessons that were learned from hard issues in the 1990s, we have taken great steps towards a degreed officer corps, as an example, but have also moved beyond that towards graduate degrees in conjunction with the Canadian Forces College and the Royal Military College in Kingston, and incorporating a greater body of professional military knowledge, but also knowledge that is applicable across Canadian society. That's something we pride ourselves in.