TOPICS
TOPICS
Workforce succession planning helps cultivate leaders, officials say
Agencies with good workforce succession plans that focus on recruiting and nurturing employees will feel little pain from potential retirements, personnel experts told House lawmakers Wednesday.
"Succession planning can help an agency become what it needs to be rather than recreating an existing agency," the General Accounting Office's Chris Mihm testified before a hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organization. Mihm is GAO's director of strategic issues.
During the past few years, lawmakers, workforce planning experts and administration officials have pointed to a looming retirement wave, with recent projections estimating that more than 70 percent of the federal workforce will be eligible to retire by 2010. Those projections prompted OPM and other agencies to develop workforce planning strategies. While retirements have not taken place at the rate anticipated, agencies have benefited from the attention they focused on the issue, according to Dan Blair, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management.
"Credit goes to GAO, [Comptroller General] David Walker and his staff for highlighting the problems," Blair said. "Now, agencies are preparing not only for today, but for today and the future."
To have a good succession plan, agencies must glean what competencies they have now and determine what competencies and skills will be needed in the future to meet the agency's overall mission and goals, Mihm said.
"When we go into agencies and find succession plans that aren't working well, what we find is a focus on individual positions," Mihm explained. "Good succession planning is not just looking at who's next in line for a slot, but looking at people early in their careers and determining what kind of training they need to become leaders."
Under the President's Management Agenda, agencies are graded periodically on their efforts to reform in five areas: e-government, human resources management, financial management, competitive sourcing and linking budgets to performance. Currently, no agency has achieved a "green" rating in human capital management in the traffic light-style grading system. But in the year since the ratings were launched, several agencies have made progress.
"As the expression goes, what gets measured is what gets done," Blair said.
The administration is expected to release the PMA's fiscal 2003 fourth quarter ratings in the next few weeks.
COMMENTS
- Geez, I can top that one! How about a hiring manager who hires a functionally illiterate individual into a leader position which requires the incumbent to be able to read, analyze and write program assessments? And to direct the efforts of 6 other highly qualified individuals. And who, to educated customers, should be actively marketing the program thru group presentations and other high-visibility marketing activities. There were 10 applicants for the job, all of whom had experience and were educated enough to represent the office far better than this guy. We even learned later that the person selected copied his job application from another individual in the office to apply for this job. The qualifications of the person selected were exactly one: he did everything he could to make the selecting official's life easier (brewed his coffee, turned on office lights in the morning, booted his computer, and regularly spies on co-workers to report it to the hiring manager...and more). That the person hired is African American would be of no consequence to me were he qualified to do the job - but I AM of the opinion that this is an example of affirmative action that has gone badly wrong. H Posted October 3, 2003 11:20 AM
- Where I work succession planning and sucking up must be the same thing. My unit just hired a manager (GS15) from a list of candidates. The successful candidate was known to all of us at least a year before the phoney process began. Of the finalists the chosen person had a BS degee and several years of government experience and no professional engineering certificate. To get to this guy they turned down a government employee with more government experience, a professional engineering designation and a masters degree. Both work in the same unit and both are considered competent by the work force. The hiring person had been in the hiring positioon for less than 6 months at the time and is military that will be moving on in 2 years. The civilians have to live with this joke for the rest of their careers. Tax Payer Posted October 2, 2003 7:04 AM
