The very nature of the different Staff Corps in the United States Navy can make it difficult at times to bring in enough officer candidates to meet the need. Staff Corps officers have earned at least an undergraduate degree in a specialized career field (or are on their way to earning one), and if the demand is high in the civilian sector for the services they will be providing, the income gap between Navy pay and private-sector income can be fairly substantial.
It’s a problem that’s even more common in the Supply Corps, particularly in the case of potential applicants who have already earned a postgraduate degree related to one of the Corps’ fields of activity such as product acquisition, supply chain management, or business and financial management. In 2015, for instance, the median hourly wage for a purchasing manager in the private sector was $52 and the mean average salary was over $114,000.
Of course, undergraduate students accepted into the Supply Corps’ Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island do have opportunities to earn that valuable postgraduate degree. One way is to attend the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey (NPS), California. Masters’ degrees that can be earned in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy include MBA, MSM (Master of Science in Management), MSCM (Master of Science in Contract Management), MSPM (Master of Science in Program Management), MAM (Master of Arts in Management), and the EMBA (Executive Master in Business Administration).