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As the federal workforce grows older, government CIOs find themselves struggling with effective ways to retain highly-knowledgeable IT workers. They also face a tough time convincing younger workers – people in their 20s and early 30s – to not only work for a government agency but to stick with it over time.
According to a recently-published report by the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, federal IT workers who are 45 or older represent a staggering 63% of the federal IT workforce. Baby Boomers – classified as those between the ages of 45 to 63 -- represent the single biggest chunk of the federal IT workforce at 60%.
It’s scary to think how many federal IT workers are poised to retire and how federal CIOs will ever manage to replace their vast knowledge of legacy systems and internal processes. In ‘Uncle Sam’s Brain Drain’, an article published by Computerworld eight years ago, the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) estimated at the time that more than half of federal IT workers would become eligible to retire by 2012.
In partnership with in partnership with the Office of Personnel Management’s Human Capital Leadership and Merit Systems Accountability Division, the Federal CIO Council has completed three periodic IT workforce capability assessments. Based on the IT Workforce Capability Assessment (ITWCA) survey of 2006, four specialized job classifications were identified as high priority: enterprise architecture, IT project management, IT security/information assurance and solutions architecture.
In many respects the pending brain drain is a more complicated problem for federal CIOs to tackle than for private sector CIOs who face a similar mass exodus of retirement-age IT staffers. For starters, government pensions are typically more attractive than 401(k) plans, even in prosperous times. I’m convinced that a sizeable portion of older private-sector IT staffers will opt to extend their careers so long as they remain viably employed or can continue as contract workers. They'll do this for the same reason that other types of private-sector workers will extend their careers: because they have to.
But even though a growing number of government workers are likely to remain in the workforce longer, particularly as people live longer, more active lives, there’s no avoiding the fact that most federal IT workers have pretty decent nest eggs to fall back on. It’s one of the perks of working in the public sector. Salaries aren’t as high as in the private sector but you can’t beat the benefits package (i.e. pension, healthcare, vacation, sick days, etc.). Eventually many of these older federal IT workers are going to clock out. Finding twentysomethings who are eager to work on Cobol programs won’t be easy.
But there’s more to the fed recruitment puzzle than that. Many public and private-sector IT managers complain that the current crop of recent college grads have wanderlust in their hearts. They’re not content with working their way up the ladder. They want new assignments and new challenges on a regular basis. And if their employer isn’t willing to provide those opportunities fast enough, they bolt – even if they haven’t lined up another job.
The report offers several recommendations for recruiting and retaining "Net Generation" IT workers. These include creating opportunities for “Net Geners” to share their ideas with senior leaders while balancing the chain of command structure that’s in place within most federal agencies. This generation also expects to receive a lot of feedback on their work. They also communicate a lot differently than Baby Boomers – texting and chatting is big. As the report points out, there will need to be some “give-and-take on communications.”
But first, CIOs will have to come up with some creative ways to lure and keep Net Geners.
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