It’s great that the Office of Personnel Management has released a new quick guide to the federal retirement process, along with other updates to their website for federal employees who are planning to retire. The last attempt at explaining the process was way back in 1998, in a 109-page chapter of a handbook on the Civil Service Retirement System and the Federal Employees Retirement System. And that chapter was written with agency retirement specialists in mind, not ordinary federal employees. 

Agencies, as part of their ongoing responsibility to provide employees with information about their benefits, are expected to make employees aware early in their careers about retirement issues, such as deposits for civilian and military service credit. The extent to which they do an effective job of explaining benefits has a direct impact on how smooth the retirement process is for employees. Federal workers who have attended my pre-retirement planning seminars have told me that some agencies do a better job than others. 

The retirement process is, on the surface, fairly straightforward. But all it takes is missing a few pages of documentation or forgetting to sign a document to throw the process off course. The newly released guide is only three pages long. But it includes some very important details about the retirement process and spells out the steps that employees must take along the way.