Originally posted by: marvdmartian
Originally posted by: PrinceofWands
Well, there's advancement exams to get your promotions. And there are plenty of optional things you could do (like cross-rating). Other than that, not really. That was Navy, 15 years ago though.
There's also watch station training, at least in most cases. Some easy (man overboard watch), some more difficult (engineering, officer of the deck, etc). There's also ongoing safety training, casualty/general quarter drills, and other stuff like self aid buddy aid training.
Pretty much, the military mindset is that the more you sweat in peace time, the less you'll (hopefully) bleed in combat. Did you ever wonder how, when the navy destroyer had a huge hole blown in the side of it in the Yemen terror attack, it didn't sink? That hole was surely big enough to fill the people space with water, and send it to the bottom of the harbor. But the endless damage control practise (drills) that the ship's crew went through paid off, and they kept the flooding & fire from spreading to other parts of the ship, and saved lives.
Nowadays, too, if you want to make senior rankings, you pretty much have to qualify for a warfare pin (air or surface warfare) to be competitive, and submariners do have to qualify for their dolphins.
So yeah, there's pretty much constant training of one sort or another, but not anything like college or high school.