Yes. Everyone becomes an 1-level student out of Basic. Some with experience,
or high aptitude scores, are allowed to self-pace and graduate early.

When you arrive at your first base, you will be an apprentice, and however fast
you want to go to journeyman is up to you. Everyone is given 1 year, I seem
to recall. You have to be 95% complete on your skills training, and have taken
a written test. They called apprentice's 3-level's and journeymen were 5-levels.
When you make NCO status, you usually are skilled enough to be a supervisor,
and they call that a 7-level. The little screw-drivers you see clipped to the
fatigue pockets, are called 7-level screwdrivers :-)

With self-pace, you can be out of tech school pretty fast, but tech school is
usually 36 weeks of party-time and lustful frolic, that I can't imagine anyone
wanting to end it early...

Unless you are poor, I wouldn't recommend enlisting. You really want to be
an officer in today's military. Trust me, I was both, and being enlisted anything,
is like being a 12 year old for life. No respect.

"Steven Wagner" wrote
Does anybody know what the USAF tends to do when people with a directly
translatable skill, i.e. civilian aircraft mechanics or computer programmers,
enlist? I expect that they would have to go through basic training, but would
they have to go through the entire course of technical training that somebody
with no experience in the skill would have to go through?