Bridging the Skills Gap: Part II

Part I of this series (Winter 2009/2010) defined a skills gap as a significant fissure between an organizations current capabilities and the skills it needs to achieve its mission and goals. Part II examines skills gaps facing the federal government and how some agencies are addressing them.

Bridging the Skills Gap, a white paper based on research by the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), identified two underlying causes of widespread skills gaps in the United States:

• jobs today require more knowledge work, more teamwork, and more use of technology than in the past
• educational attainment has fallen behind the nations need for skilled workers.

These factors, which are intensified by changing demographics and new technology in the workplace, have created major skills gaps across all sectors of the economy, including the federal government. In ASTDs research, 79.2 percent of responding organizations admitted to having a skills gap. The top three gaps across all sectors were leadership and executive-level skills, basic skills, and professional or organization-specific skills.

Authors Linda J. Bilmes and W. Scott Gould, in The People Factor: Strengthening America by Investing in Public Service, note these overall skills gaps in government: management, supervision, technical skills, and skills for leading and managing change.

The complexity of administering government programs today adds to the list of new skills required of government employees. Harvard professor Stephen Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis, notes that government workers need agility, creativity, flexibility, and resourcefulness to work with myriad partners, vendors, and organizations involved in most federal programs. The governments increasing use of contractors has changed the nature of many federal workers jobs, says Goldsmith. They must find and evaluate vendors, execute contracts with them, and monitor their perfor- mance and results. Lack of such skills drives up costs and drives down performance.

Despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on new information technology to better manage its vast data resources, many agencies have merely automated old paper-based processes because they lack IT skills, process management skills, and change management skills. But there are encouraging exceptions. Efforts such as Intellipedia and FedSpace demonstrate creative new approaches to leveraging government information and sharing knowledge.

Skill shortages in the federal sector are compounded by other factors, such as complex hiring systems and low-tech environments, which discourage talented young people from seeking government jobs. At the same time, the retirement of thousands of federal managers is diluting the governments stock of experienced human capital. Agencies lack standards of competence for managers and supervisors, and few do comprehensive workforce planning.

Strategic Management of Human Capital

A number of studies show that managing human capital effectively is a source of competitive advantage for organizations of all types. Research by ASTD and the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) confirms that organizations that integrate key aspects of their talent management and link them to mission and strategy outperform those that do not.

Assuring the strategic capability of its workforce is a goal that has eluded many federal agencies. Critics cite the federal governments top-down management structure burdened with political appointees; its stove-piped job classifications; and its slow rate of change as major obstacles to managing talent for better performance. But other observers, such as Bilmes and Gould, single out agencies that have changed the way they recruit, train, measure, reward, and manage their workforces despite such obstacles.

These agencies include the Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, where strategic human capital management has become central to success. These agencies, whose people-centered cultures attract bright young employees, stand in sharp contrast to others where backlogs, customer service failures, and cost overruns are the norm.

The federal government missed out on the productivity boom that transformed the private sector over the past two decades, said the U.S. Office of Management and Budgets Deputy Director for Management and Chief Performance Officer, Jeffrey Zients, in a Federal News Radio interview. He offered these examples of processes in need of overhaul: The average time to process a patent is three years; veterans wait an average of 160 days to receive benefits; and it takes an average of 139 days to complete the hiring process at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Zients reviewed the governments performance improvement agenda: eliminate waste, drive top priorities, leverage purchasing scale, close the IT performance gap, open government to get the right results, and attract and motivate top talent. In speeches and interviews, Zients often says that managing talent is the most important of these strategies.

Authors Bilmes and Gould cite these agencies for creating new models for managing their human capital:

• Defense Logistics Agency (developed a human capital strategy)
• U.S. Government Accountability Office (transformed hiring and recruiting)
• National Nuclear Security Administration (engaged senior management in transformation)
• U.S. Internal Revenue Service (reorganized to align with four customer groups)
• U.S. Veterans Health Administration (promoted innovation)
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (instituted workforce planning)
• Defense Acquisition University (used technology to provide widespread training and certification)
• U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (created a state-of-the-art social networking site Intellipedia for information sharing across the intelligence community).

Agencies seeking to address skills gaps and become more focused on leveraging their talent have

• tailored their talent management systemshow they recruit, train, evaluate, compensate, reward, and lead employeesto specific types of jobs and skills deemed critical to success
• adapted models of management from the forprofit world to the goals of nonprofit enterprises
• measured the impact of their talent management efforts
• demonstrated to taxpayers the value of changing to a people-centric focus in terms of gains in productivity, performance, efficiency, cost-savings, and customer service.

Hiring Practices Under the Microscope

Efforts are underway to reform some of the governments HR practices that are thought to get in the way of hiring people with the skills needed to improve performance.

Led by Angela Bailey, deputy associate director for the Center for Talent & Capacity Policya team at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is designing and will implement an overall hiring reform plan that produces an understandable and easy-to-use hiring processensures the right people are placed in the right jobs and helps agencies accomplish their missions.

The target audience for such reforms are new applicants. Rather than answering essay questions, for example, applicants will be able to submit a resume and cover letter through USAJobs.gov. Hiring managers will be trained to discern an applicants knowledge and skills from the information in the resume.

We want to get away from hiring one person at a time, says John Berry, OPM director. Instead, we want to use pools of similar applicants from which many agencies can hire. There are already 14 registries of 100,000 qualified applicants. If you like someone in the pool, you can interview and hire them tomorrow, says Berry whose primary responsibilities are to improve federal recruiting strategies and expedite hiring. Agencies working to reform their hiring practices and improve retention may look to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which began examining its hiring processes six years ago using a Six Sigma review. To improve retention, it has implemented a culture of continuous improvement, piloted a flexible work schedule that combines telework and days in the office, and engaged senior leaders in monthly meetings to discuss employee engagement.

Efforts to offer telework to more people in the federal workforce met a stumbling block in the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted down the Telework Improvements Act on May 6, 2010. But Berry remains optimistic about the future. Accountability, flexibility, and training are the three pillars of our work. Our task is to bring our HRM systems into 21st century and to advance the presidents goal of ensuring that our countrys best and brightest continue to be drawn into the service of our country.