Advancement

Cordes Lindow, March 24, 2025

Often known as the Trail to Eagle, advancement is designed to expose scouts to a variety of experiences. It gives them goals and a system of feedback to help recognize and reward them along the way and encourage them to keep learning and growing. The goal of advancement is NOT to become an Eagle Scout but to learn character development, leadership, citizenship, and personal fitness as they go through the process

Rank Advancement

The first several ranks are to develop the skills needed for citizenship, character and personal fitness. These early ranks are:

The Guide to Advancement suggests that the goal is to move Scouts through these advancements in 12-18 months. Therefore, for early scouts, the focus should be on learning these basic skills. All of these advancements can be earned at the same time, but each rank has progressively more difficult skills. For example, you may see knots in every rank. Scout rank requires learning to tie a square knot, but First Class requires building a structure using lashing.

There are many Eagle-required merit badges with overlapping requirements. As scouts work on these merit badges, they can learn the skills they need for early advancement, and work on earning some Eagle-required merit badges.

The merit badges which help the most with early rank advancement are:

See the document below which attempts to show how some of the merit badge requirements line up with advancement requirements.

One word of caution, while scouts can use merit badge requirements for rank advancement, they usually cannot use one merit badge requirement for another merit badge requirement. For example, a hike for the hiking merit badge can't be used for the backpacking merit badge, but it can be used for the rank advancement of navigating a 5-mile hike. Likewise, meals prepared for the cooking merit badge can't be used for the meals required in the camping merit badge, but they can be used for rank advancements.

Merit Badges that align with early rank advancement

Merit Badges and Advancement

Higher rank advancement

Once a Scout has achieved First Class Rank, they have learned all the basic scouting skills and focus on leadership, service and merit badges. This is a time that Scouts should be teaching newer scouts the skills, taking on a "Position of Responsibility" (POR) and working on their other Eagle-Required merit badges for citizenship, personal management, etc. which are more advanced.

There are also many awards they can earn for combining  merit badges like the National Outdoor Award.

This is when scouting really gets good. Scouts are ready for high adventures, teaching and leading other girls and exploring the possibilities of what they can accomplish. Earning Eagle rank is not a culmination, but a pathway to guide them on learning these skills. Even after earning Eagle, there is still much for Scouts to look forward to as they can continue to earn recognitions for further accomplishments.