he Presidential Management Intern Program has been winning the praises of those it serves -- agency managers and graduate students alike -- ever since it was created by executive order in 1977 to tap the best and the brightest from public administration schools and prepare them for careers in the civil service.
In 1989, the National Commission on Public Service even recommended that the program be expanded to accommodate up to 1,000 interns a year. Such a step now would seem pointless, as recent PMI classes of 300 to 400 finalists have not all been able to find jobs. And the placement problem will likely get worse.
Last year, the five Office of Personnel Management employees running the Presidential Management Intern (PMI) program got a real jolt when they faced the kind of job gap they most feared. More than 400 finalists were chosen, but only 230 found jobs. The reason? Downsizing of federal operations, particularly those with national defense and intelligence missions, translated into a stagnant government job market. The federal government hired only 52,211 new people in 1992, a little more than half the number it hired as recently as 1989.
The prognosis grows dimmer still in light of the Clinton administration's National Performance Review, which recommends cutting the federal workforce by 252,000 jobs, or 12 percent. The news is particularly grim for PMIs and other young professionals aspiring to managerial slots; most of the demand for new hires is in such entry-level clerical occupations as secretary and data-entry clerk.
PMI program managers are not taking the losses sitting down. Like manufacturers of a luxury product that take its desirability for granted until a recession hits, they have launched a campaign to convince agencies that the program is valuable even in today's shrinking job market.
OPM selects PMI finalists from among thousands of applicants nominated by their graduate schools. The thorough two-part screening process involves interviews, essays, impromptu speaking and problem solving. Those who emerge as finalists are not guaranteed jobs; they must seek employment with any of the federal agencies themselves. The PMI office at OPM does help out by publishing a book listing openings at the agencies and working year-round to guarantee a few of those spots for PMIs.
Interns who find jobs start at the GS-9 level. They have a plethora of training opportunities available to them, including the possibility of rotating job assignments within the agency or even doing brief stints at other agencies or on Capitol Hill. OPM also facilitates special seminars for PMIs and a support network through which interns may share experiences. PMIs graduate from the program after two years, at which time they are eligible for conversion to career or career-conditional appointments, and for promotion to the GS-12 level.
Agencies pay OPM $ 2,100 a year for every PMI they hire. (The PMI program's budget is a revolving fund based on how many interns are placed in a year). In return for their $ 2,100, the agencies get to skip all the burdensome paperwork that normally goes along with a new hire. "An agency knows that when it gets a list of finalists, they have been thoroughly examined," says Rita Rutsohn, coordinator of the PMI program. "They also know that if they had to pay for the kind of strenuous recruiting, advertising and screening we do, they couldn't afford it."
Since 1988, when the ceiling on finalist slots jumped from 200 to 400, the program has not placed more than 70 percent of the finalists in agency jobs and in some years has placed less than 60 percent. And the federal hiring squeeze looks to be cutting into that base as well. Finalists who don't get positions cannot reapply.
Betty Hull, the PMI coordinator for the Army, says her agency will be "hiring probably half of what we used to" this year. The Department of Health and Human Services, the agency employing the most PMIs, will also take fewer interns this year. Dave Nettleton, agency coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says he had to do "a lot of stumping" to get even five positions for the PMI program.
Program officials are responding by lowering the expectations of potential interns. Rutsohn is warning graduate schools that the program will select only about 300 finalists next year. In addition, the PMI office has figured out a way to guage more accurately the number of positions that will be available for PMIs to fill. In previous years, it used to-survey the agencies almost five months before the applicants were selected. By the time the finalists were ready to apply for jobs, the information was outdated, and finalists were often sent on wild-goose chases. This year, the PMI program collected the data on available jobs a month before finalists were selected, which yielded a smaller but more fruitful number of prospects.
But adjusting high hopes is only part of the equation. When the labor market started to contract, the program began to aggressively market itself to agencies.
Marketing Strategies
PMI managers at OPM used to concentrate almost solely on recruiting first-class students to apply for PMI positions, all but ignoring the need to market the program to federal agencies. As a result, although the program is 15 years old, many managers still don't know about it.
One way of educating agency managers about the program has been to exploit the network of interns already in place. At the Education Department, current interns recently organized their own informal meeting to tell managers about the program. According to Rutsohn, more than 25 managers who had never participated in the program showed up to listen, and Education is expected to take twice as many interns this year as last.
The PMI program has also become much more sensitive to agencies' recruiting needs. "Our two goals are to diversify the program both in terms of the participants and in terms of the academic majors," says Rutsohn.
The PMI program was founded with the stipulation that it would groom public administration graduates, but agencies soon wanted to use the program to draw in people with other degrees. The Army Material Command, for example, wanted to attract engineers, and HHS wanted people with biology and chemistry degrees. A 1982 executive order did finally open the program to all academic disciplines, but the transition to a truly multi-major intern population has been slow. Of the 401 PMI finalists selected in 1991, 332 had degrees in public administration, international affairs or public policy.
"Part of the problem is that the schools that have been traditionally entrenched in the program have a well-oiled machine -- study sessions and alumni coming back to lecture -- so when you bring in the new schools, you get a disparity," Rutsohn says. "This year, more than half of the finalists still represent schools of public affairs, public policy and international affairs." Rutsohn is determined to make the PMI program more available to professionals in fields other than public administration. She is not looking for any particular type of major, but she says people with business degrees have shown a lot of interest.
Forward-looking agencies are beginning to take advantage of the new latitude in eligibility requirements when doing their own recruiting. The General Services Administration, for example, approached the PMI program to see whether students attending contract management and acquisition schools, where GSA prefers to recruit new hires, could be covered by the program. When GSA managers found out these students were allowed to apply, they took the PMI application forms to campuses themselves.
OPM has also had some success with increasing minority participation in the PMI program. In 1993, 15 percent of the interns were minorities, up from 11 percent in 1992. Rutsohn says OPM's emphasis on making the program more diverse dovetails nicely with the agencies' own need to attract more minority candidates.
While the direct student recruiting is done by OPM's regional offices, Rutsohn's office is contacting national associations representing various ethnic groups to make its own pitch. Rutsohn made a presentation at a career information event that the Army holds annually in conjunction with Historically Black Colleges and Universities; most of the audience said they had never heard of the program. Rutsohn says her office has also been "piggybacking" on minority-recruitment efforts by such agencies as the Department of Agriculture (through its land-grant colleges program), the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Of course, all this new emphasis on selling the interns to the agencies is not solving other problems caused by the hiring freeze. The PMI program is part of the Human Resources Development group at OPM, and is technically a career training program, not a recruiting tool. Its goal is to take potential managerial stars and allow them access to the kind of experiences and training that would enable them to blossom. Warren Lenhart, a career development group leader at the Congressional Research Service, says the agencies' increasing short-handedness is hampering this effort. He explains, "as the budget gets tighter, agencies aren't going to be able to afford to let people rotate. As it is, the rotations have already decreased."
But for now, the PMI program is worrying about keeping its head above water before worrying about how to swim.
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