Burning Question: Do agencies make new employees do busywork?
New acquisition workers at one agency report their days are filled with drudgery and downtime.
The Obama administration says that one of government's key imperatives is beefing up the acquisition workforce with fresh talent. But in his "Lectern" blog at Federal Computer Week, Steve Kelman, former head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, writes that new hires at one agency he visited were given work that didn't draw on their talents. On top of that, they didn't get much training or attention from higher-ups.
"The new hires reported that their supervisors and other senior people seemed to be either too busy to mentor them and bring them into their teams, or didn't seem to regard this as a priority," Kelman writes.
The question is whether this problem is isolated to individual agencies and the acquisition workforce, or whether it's a broader problem in government.
Are we wasting the talents of our new government contracting hires?
(The Lectern, Federal Computer Week)
Burning Question is a recurring feature that looks at key issues and compelling stories being explored at other publications and social media sites covering the federal government.