I don't know about the military, although my impression is that it's even worse there than in the corporate world. There's no requirement to have vocational/higher ed training to join the military; although I think they've gotta have a GED, which supposedly is equal to a High School Diploma.
Actually it's the exact opposite. In the military, our management is all officers or senior non-commissioned officers. They've all had college-level training to do their jobs. Officers have degrees and Officer Training School, and SNCOs have at least had six weeks of NCO Academy (reserves can do this by correspondence; I did NCO and SNCO Academy in-residence). I do think they push NCOs a little too hard to get degrees instead of focusing on job competency.
Airmen all get two months of basic training and then tech school. My tech school was five months plus two weeks of air conditioning school on the back end. It's pretty intensive, but it's not hands-on in a shop. They beat us to death with electrical troubleshooting because that's the skill that most techs have the hardest time with. The downside is that the trainees come out not knowing basic shop skills. That's expected to be taught on-the-job.
Once the trainees are in the shop, there is a regimented training program for tracking their training on every piece of equipment. The problem is that trainers are usually expected to turn out more work because they "have more manpower". If a trainer is lazy the training takes a back seat to pumping work out and the trainee is used as a gopher and the training gets pencil-whipped. If the trainer is a go-getter, he has to put in twelve hours a day to ensure the trainee is on track while still pumping out all his required work and managing his additional duties *. Then he gets to go work on his physical fitness on his own time and manage other aspects of military life instead of being with his family.
That's far and above what I've seen at almost every civilian employer I've had. It was always a case of the company hiring someone who was under-qualified so they could under-pay them, and then seeing if they sink or swim. You're always led by the most incompetent @$$holes who've bounced around jobs. Boeing was the exception. Every supervisor I ever had at Boeing had the training and experience to do the job they were hired for **. It was refreshingly competent.
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* In the military, you have your job, but you're also assigned "additional duties". You can be the haz-mat monitor for your shop, or an equipment custodian, or a security manager, etc. These are jobs that require a significant amount of attention to perform correctly. During inspections these get special attention, so if you excel at your special duty, you can be a dirtbag worker and still look good to your commander.
** We had one guy who got promoted for screwing the union who was incompetent at management. He got fired pretty quickly after his promotion.
