Always 'Taking the Initiative to Step Half a Step Forward,' He Has Broadened the Military Careers of Many Comrades

Staff Sergeant First Class Li Xin stands over 190 centimeters tall—most people have to look up when talking to him. He wears black-framed glasses, speaks in an unhurried manner, and has a habit of pushing his frames up.

Who is Li Xin? He is an instructor at the training cadre unit (教导队) of a certain Navy element, responsible for radio operator (报务) instruction and training. He also concurrently serves as the head of the Navy vocational skills assessment station (职业技能鉴定站) for information and communications specialties in the garrison area and surrounding region.

When comrades talk about Li Xin, they have a vivid way of putting it: whatever he does, he always "takes the initiative to step half a step forward"—even when the work is only a collateral duty.

The year he transferred from the radio operator company to the training cadre unit to serve as an instructor, Li Xin was given an urgent assignment to organize that year's vocational skills assessment for the information and communications specialty. After receiving the task, he learned on the job and managed to get through it well enough.

But when the results came out, Li Xin found that his unit's pass rate was under 20 percent. "The gap with other services is too wide to be explained simply by individual differences among the soldiers," Li Xin thought as he stared at the score sheet. "Our comrades have to prepare for the vocational skills assessment on top of their already heavy training workload—that's no easy thing. A pass rate this low must be a real blow to morale. What can I do about it?"

Li Xin went out of his way to contact units with high pass rates, and after multiple rounds of communication and inquiry, he found the reason. It turned out that the Navy's information and communications specialty had no complete, dedicated question bank of its own. Soldiers preparing for the exam were using question banks from other services and branches, which meant an enormous scope of study covering a wide range of specialties.

After consulting with higher authorities, Li Xin received this reply: the Navy's vocational skills assessment covers many specialties and is highly complex; the assessment program has not been running long, and the question bank has yet to be completed.

"Since the higher authorities haven't finished compiling it yet, can we put together our own question bank for the information and communications specialty to use in the meantime?" Li Xin submitted the suggestion to the competent higher-level department and quickly received a reply: approved.

In the months that followed, Li Xin worked overtime on top of his primary duties to sort through the study and training syllabi for nearly 20 sub-specialties within the information and communications specialty, and used them as the basis for compiling questions. He set himself a countdown deadline, determined to complete a question bank belonging to the Navy's own information and communications specialty before the next assessment examination.

Several months later, Li Xin submitted the compiled question bank to the examination-organizing unit and simultaneously distributed it to comrades preparing for the exam. The following year, when the unit again organized participation in the vocational skills assessment, the pass rate rose to 80 percent.

"If we could do more to publicize and encourage comrades to register for the assessment, fewer of those who can't stay in service for lack of an assessment result would have to leave with regrets. But relying on my voice alone, the reach of any outreach is still too limited…" Not long afterward, while sharing his frustrations with two counterparts at a certain Navy academy, Li Xin put forward a proposal: "Why don't we put together a guidance handbook—something anyone can understand at a glance?" The three of them immediately agreed and got to work.

Because assessment results bear directly on comrades' career development and advancement, the guidance handbook had to be absolutely accurate while also achieving the effect of being "understandable at a glance." So the three of them gathered all the relevant regulations on vocational assessment, worked through each one carefully until they had a thorough grasp of it, extracted the essential content into itemized lists, and provided answers to frequently asked questions. As a final thoughtful touch, they appended the contact information for the heads of each assessment station, so comrades could easily reach out with questions.

Today, this handbook has become not only the go-to reference (掌中宝) for Navy information and communications specialty non-commissioned officers seeking to understand the details of vocational skills assessment, but also a reference guide for assessment stations organizing their assessment work.

"Although I am a 'carrier' of policy, I must never be satisfied with being only a 'carrier.'" Precisely because he always "takes the initiative to step half a step forward," Li Xin has taken on a great deal of extra work over the years. But it is also precisely because of this that the military careers of many comrades have become broader.

"This year's assessment work has new developments again—we need to prepare in advance…" Now, Li Xin is getting ready to take another new "half step" forward.