In our last article for 2021 I thought it would be worth sharing SO1 PME's view of the year and let you know where we're heading in 2022. It's been a great year for The Cove and it's been my absolute pleasure to be at the helm of this fantastic and evolving resource for Army.

When I took over in January, my predecessors and their teams had built The Cove website into a comprehensive platform of crowdsourced articles, linked articles and CoveTalks. 2020 also saw the launch of Cove+, The Army's professional development program. The Cove had a strong following of mostly officers and it was in great shape; growing at about 30-40% year-on-year as measured by article hits.

We've continued to grow our website participation by 35% this year and also executed the following initiatives/activities:

  • I Wish I'd Known That...
  • Publication of 175 articles/rich media content
  • QMEs (Quick Military Education
  • Cove Advocate Group
  • Cove+ Compact
  • Leadership and STEM conferences
  • Conducted our annual survey and got some excellent feedback from you; much of which we're implementing now

We released this article last week with some of our best content from 2021.

Our highest priority in 2022 will be to continue to provide Army's individuals and commanders with more targeted, quality professional development resources in order to help Army gain the #IntellectualEdge. We've spent much of 2021 building the back-of-house support functions to enable us to produce more of our own content in 2022. Some of the new initiatives you will see from January are:

  • An updated website with improved design, better search functionality and more rich media
  • Video and CoveTalks on the DPN
  • Audio articles: a selection of our best articles read for you
  • Cove Clips: short edits of CoveTalks that give you the best bits of longer CoveTalks
  • More CoveTalks
  • A LinkedIn account
  • More vidcasts and podcasts
  • Civil recognition for Cove+ modules
  • More Cove+ Compact
  • More themes and mini-themes

I'm super proud of everyone who has contributed to bringing The Cove to you. There’s a surprisingly large amount of people including our full time Cove team, our part-time ARES staff, contracted partners from Queensland University of Technology, Interserv and Shot. Without doubt, the most important acknowledgement goes to those who have written to us and allowed us to publish their ideas for Army's collective benefit. There would be no Cove without people who take that initiative and write about something they feel passionate about.

My one request to Army's people is to download our app and turn notifications on. Leaders and commanders please encourage your people to do the same. We know everyone's time poor, but just keeping across what's on at The Cove will allow individuals to build a PME routine in very small bites each day. Creating this routine will help our people develop, become life-long learners and contribute to Army's capability. If you have any feedback or suggestions for us please get in touch with at the.cove@defence.gov.au.

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks for supporting The Cove and we'll see you when we commence publishing again on 4 January 2022.

LTCOL Marcus Luciani