Federal Daily - January 11, 2010
The Real Reason Behind the Brain Drain …
The federal “brain drain” story—the notion that the federal government will experience a huge loss of institutional knowledge as a tide of retirees exits the doors—has been making the rounds for years. And one of these years—in spite of the fact that people are working longer—it will start to happen.
But don’t blame it all on retiring Baby Boomers—that generation that filled jobs in government’s swelling ranks over the last 30 or 40 years. Because the private sector, where Boomers also work, doesn’t anticipate the same loss of experience in the workplace.
The reason: a typical private-sector worker just doesn’t stick around in a job long enough to gain the same depth of experience as an average public-sector worker.
According to a new report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, over the last 25 years, “career jobs” have not really existed for American workers as a whole. EBRI says that the “median tenure”—defined as the midpoint of wage and salary workers’ length of employment in a current job—of private and public workers combined has really not changed for 25 years: 5.1 years at the same job in 2008, compared with 5.0 years in 1983.
But break those statistics into private and public, and the story changes.
While private-sector workers’ median tenure has been steady, at about 3.9 years over the period, the median tenure for public-sector workers increased from 6.0 years in 1983 to 7.0 years in 2008—an average about 80 percent higher than that of the private sector. What’s more, almost 10 percent of public-sector workers have 25 or more years of tenure—read “experience”—a proportion much higher than that in the private sector.
EBRI’s numbers include all public workers, not just feds, whose numbers are much higher. According to a 2008 report from the Congressional Research Service, the average length of service in the federal workforce was 14.7 years in 2008. And around 20 percent of feds in 2008 had more than 25 years of service
So after the federal brain is drained, will federal service continue to attract new talent? Judge for yourself—according to trends examined by EBRI, “most U.S. private-sector workers will never become eligible for health insurance in retirement through a former employer.”
These days, that fact alone may be enough to boost competition for federal jobs.
To see more, go to: www.ebri.org/pdf/PR.862_07Jan10.Tenure.pdf, or http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34685_20080930.pdf.
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FEW Survey Shows Discontent With Pay-For-Performance Plans
By an overwhelming majority, respondents to a Federally Employed Women survey said they were largely dissatisfied with government attempts to replace the General Schedule with pay-for-performance personnel systems.
By about a two-to-one ratio, FEW members who responded to the survey said they felt the benefits of the multiple pay-for-performance systems were far outweighed by the drawbacks, FEW said in a Jan. 7 statement.
“While they (respondents) concurred that there were some beneficial reasons, in theory, to support these types of systems, current attempts in the federal government to implement them have been woefully inadequate according to the survey results,” the group said.
By far, the biggest criticism about a pay-for-performance personnel system is that managers are given too much discretion in evaluating employees when they have not been fully trained, the report said. In many instances respondents reported that supervisors simply rated all their employees as “average” because they did not have the training or expertise to adequately document different levels of performance. This average rating meant that employees would be lucky to receive a salary increase higher than the cost-of-living increase for that year, the report said.
Favoritism was another concern frequently cited by FEW members. Too often, they said, a good rating depended not on whether employees did the job, but if the manager liked them, the report said.
As a safeguard, FEW said the Office of Personnel Management should install an independent board of personnel experts to review evaluations that are appealed by employees. The appeals should not be heard and reviewed by the same agency that wrote the employee review, FEW said.
To see more, go to: http://few.org/docs/PayforPerformancePositionPaper.pdf.
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Planning Group OKs Coast Guard HQ Site Plans
The National Capital Planning Commission on Jan. 7 approved site and building plans for the U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters building and the West Ravine parking garage that are part of the new home of the Department of Homeland Security.
The Coast Guard building and parking garage are among facilities being constructed at DHS’ new consolidated headquarters, located on the 176-acre campus of the old St. Elizabeths Hospital in southeast Washington. The $3.4 billion effort is the largest federal building project in the Washington metro area since the Pentagon was built.
The USCG headquarters building will be 1.17 million square feet and house 3,860 employees. The parking garage will have 1,973 parking spaces to serve both the USCG and DHS headquarters.
Construction of the USCG headquarters is scheduled to begin in February and occupancy is scheduled for March 2013. To pay for the facility, Congress appropriated a combination of Fiscal Year 2009 and American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds for a total construction budget of $545 million.
The commission also approved modifications, which included altering the size and shape of the building footprints for the USCG headquarters and parking garage, decreasing the height of the parking garage by constructing more of it underground, and relocating the perimeter security near the historic cemetery, the panel said in a statement.
To see more, go to: www.ncpc.gov/April2009/Main(T2)/Media(Tr2)/NewsRelease3.html.
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