In addition to the usual May-esque "leaches won't stop sucking the tit"
content, there's extra-added crunchy TLA goodness...
Cheers,
RAH
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Delivered-To: clips@philodox.com
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:02:35 -0500
To: Philodox Clips List
From the Baltimore Sun
Wave of federal workers to retire
Some agencies streamline hiring as longtime staff prepare to leave
By Melissa Harris
Sun reporter
March 19, 2006
The wave of federal workers originally hired to spy on the Soviet Union,
launch the Great Society and regulate everyone from polluters to drugmakers
in the 1960s and 1970s is beginning to age out of the work force, an exodus
that some officials say could drain expertise and diminish the quality of
service.
The numbers point to what some call a "retirement tsunami": 60 percent of
federal workers are older than 45, and many could retire now if they wanted
to, compared with 31 percent in the private sector, according to one think
tank.
Experts say that the next five years could see a mass exit of experienced -
and loyal - employees at a time when some younger workers see public
service as a steppingstone to lucrative private-sector jobs.
"The loss of so many individuals with a deep, ingrained institutional
knowledge of their agency has the potential to cause a lapse or pause of
service delivery," Linda Springer, director of the Office of Personnel
Management, said at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington.
Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit
human resources think tank, said he sees signs of that in such things as
the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the lagging translation
of foreign intelligence at the FBI.
"It's a problem of rust, rather than engine failure," said Stier, whose
group, which helps the federal government improve its hiring practices,
provided numbers on the coming federal retirement wave.
"It creeps up slowly but nonetheless can have devastating consequences. ...
The work will not get done at the same level unless older workers stay
longer or they are replaced with equal or superior folks."
Don Freeburn is one of those whose skills and experience hang in the
balance. Hired by NASA in 1965, he worked on the Apollo program and is a
general engineer with the Department of Energy.
He could have retired eight years ago, but college bills kept him in the
work force.
"First of all, the job is great," said Freeburn, 63, of Clarksburg.
"Second, this is a high cost-of-living area, and, basically, I had two kids
in college, a wife who went back to college, and those debts over the last
10 years. Next year, I'll take another look at the finances."
His situation mirrors that of many older workers who rode into public
service on the idealism of the 1960s.
Heeding the call
Early in that decade, people in their 20s heeded President John F.
Kennedy's call to do something for their country, and the federal
government hired them in record numbers.
Excluding the Postal Service, it added more than 428,000 employees during
the 1960s, a growth of about 23 percent.
The Social Security Administration, with headquarters in Woodlawn, was a
prime illustration. By the mid-1970s, young employees had swelled its work
force to almost 82,500 workers nationally, nearly seven times its size in
1950. Many of them were hired en masse to handle an expansion of disability
benefits.
The tide turned in the 1980s and 1990s. During the Reagan era, executive
branch employment outside of the Defense Department and the Postal Service
shrank 11 percent, to 1.16 million, according to Office of Personnel
Management data, as employees rode out on anti-big-government rhetoric.
Budgets were stripped. Agencies laid off workers under official "reductions
in force." Then President Bill Clinton shrank the military.
Privatization further scaled back the ranks, as did early-retirement
packages aimed at meeting year-to-year cuts. Some recruiters no longer had
a reason to give speeches at colleges or attend a large number of job fairs
because they were hiring few people. Little attention was given to whether
enough talent remained to replace retiring senior managers.
As a result, both of the Baltimore area's largest agencies - Social
Security and the National Security Agency - have been playing catch-up.
"We hired no more than a handful of people, 200 to 250 per year, through
the '90s," said John Taflan, director of human resources at the NSA, which
eavesdrops on calls and e-mail globally. "We had to ramp up to rebuild a
recruiting network. ... It took us about three years to get it going again."
Given the new demands after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the
agency plans to hire 1,500 people worldwide yearly from 2003 to 2011, and
Taflan said the nature of that work dictates that about 60 percent of those
hired are recent college graduates.
But training those workers - 97 percent of whom stay until retirement - is
slow.
"It takes three to five years and, for more difficult languages, seven
years, to train someone to see behind the actual spoken word and draw
conclusions from it," Taflan said. "It's hard to hire someone midway
through their career because of the long training time. They're over
halfway through their career and just learning how to do the work."
Social Security hired almost 16,000 workers from fiscal 2002 to fiscal 2005
to gear up for coming retirements. The agency is in fairly good shape in
terms of staffing, officials say.
"SSA hasn't been losing permanent positions in great numbers," said Terry
Stradtman, a regional director who oversees 450 workers in several
Mid-Atlantic states, including Maryland. "Some other agencies have been
forced to downsize more drastically."
Hurdles to hiring
In filling crucial vacancies in a tight labor market, government agencies
face a number of challenges.
Workers with more than 30 years of service can retire as early as age 55
and not lose benefits. Federal workers have pensions, a well-managed
401(k)-style plan and access to health care for life, but their pay
generally is lower than in the private sector. Statistics show that
government agencies end up hiring a far smaller percentage of their interns
than do their private-sector counterparts.
And the government hiring process can be the definition of red tape, with
job postings written in impenetrable jargon and applicants asked to answer
detailed questionnaires as well as submit college transcripts.
Previously, the Woodlawn-based Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
took 90 days on average to hire someone, and its personnel department had
to go through 64 steps to do so. Many applicants never heard back from the
agency.
Federal executives had to be persuaded that recruitment, hiring and
retention were top priorities, said Dan Blair, deputy director of the
Office of Personnel Management.
"We had to convince people at the top level that this is not a human
resources thing that can be relegated to the back room," Blair said.
The Medicare agency has made over its hiring process, drastically reducing
the number of steps and smoothing out the language in its job postings.
Social Security has won awards in planning for the retirement wave and for
its rapid hiring speed of 26 days from application deadline to a job offer
during fiscal year 2005.
The National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have started
sharing job applications.
The NSA also runs a program that gives college students free tuition, room
and board in exchange for a commitment to work for the government after
graduation.
On the whole, the federal government is trying to move faster and to
sweeten the pot with sign-on bonuses, work-from-home opportunities and
tuition reimbursement.
"We feel we have as fine of a recruitment marketing program as anyone else
in terms of our posters, brochures and CD-ROMs," said Fred Glueckstein, who
directs Social Security's recruitment planning efforts. "We have materials
in almost 100 languages. We've put a lot of thought in how to do this
right."
Retention
Agencies are also beginning to look at ways to retain graying workers past
their retirement age, something that might dovetail with the desires of
baby boomers.
A Merrill Lynch survey last year found that 76 percent of people born after
World War II and before 1964 plan to work during retirement. Ideally, the
respondents said, they would like to move between periods of work and
leisure.
Almost all of them - 94 percent - said they don't plan to work full time.
Federal rules don't always support flexibility. But Springer said the
retirement wave means that federal agencies no longer have the "luxury" of
turning away workers with decades of institutional knowledge just because
they don't want to work 9-to-5 every day.
The aging of the federal work force has effects beyond the on-the-job hours.
In the 1970s, Social Security headquarters had more than 100 softball teams
for its energetic young workers. Six teams remain.
"I occasionally have to serve the players icepacks with their beers," joked
Carol Wiland, a bartender at Monaghan's Pub in Gwynn Oak, which has served
as the teams' de facto clubhouse for decades.
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R. A. Hettinga