Demand for security, law enforcement workers to increase

Workers with security, law enforcement and investigative experience will be in high demand in federal agencies over the next two years, along with people in the medical, engineering, science and business disciplines, according to a new report.

In a survey that covered 95 percent of the government's workforce, the Partnership for Public Service and the National Academy of Public Administration compared demand for new workers with the private sector's needs and concluded that a tight labor market for talent will make recruiting increasingly difficult.

Kevin Simpson, the partnership's executive vice president and general counsel, said the government needs to plan ahead and anticipate recruitment crunches. The report, which was initiated a year ago, is part of an effort to get government agencies to approach recruiting problems with longer-term strategies, he said.

"Certainly for the sciences and engineering, we do not have sufficient numbers of Americans that are going into those kinds of graduate programs," Simpson said. "It's a significant challenge, and it's going to take a lot of work."

The report found that certain areas of government hiring, such as the biological sciences, will be squeezed by relatively small growth in the labor market. For example, agencies are expected to hire more than 5,000 new workers in the biological sciences over the next 10 years. But numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the overall labor pool in the field will increase by about 22,000, leaving only 17,000 people to meet the needs of the entire private sector.

The overall number of people training to be scientists and engineers is expected to decline, making the jobs of government recruiters progressively more difficult. Since federal agencies primarily hire U.S. citizens, government recruiters are handicapped by the exclusion of the most plentiful sources of talent in these fields.

In the medical field, a national nursing shortage is expected to make it difficult for the Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services departments to hire a necessary 12,000 nurses in the next two years.

The report projects a demand for more than 37,000 new inspectors, investigators, compliance officers, police officers, security and prison guards and airport screeners during the next two years.

Driving this demand is the Transportation Security Administration, which estimated it will need to hire 9,000 new screeners this year and next. Under a law passed last year, the Homeland Security Department is supposed to hire 2,000 new border patrol agents per year. The department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau will need to hire 800 investigators. The report did not include potential new hires in the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency, which also are expected to increase.

According to the report, demand for support staff in agencies is declining because many of those jobs are being automated. The reported cited the IRS's electronic filing program as an example of technology phasing out the need for workers who perform routine clerical tasks.

"The bottom line is that less skilled means less needed. More routine work is either being contracted out or overtaken by technology," the report stated.

The report recommended that agencies follow up on their workforce plans and examine their recruiting successes. Planning should "cascade down" to all agency levels, and agencies should be required to develop annual recruitment plans, the report concluded.