While the Department of Defense (DoD) has immense amounts of data on recruitment, retention, and development of its military workforce, the same cannot be said for its civilian workforce. That’s why the Pentagon’s talent management office is pursuing a plan to close that data gap to improve civilian workforce operations.
At the Workday Federal Forum on May 22 in Washington, Love Rutledge, chief of staff for the DoD’s Office of the Chief Talent Management Officer, said the department has put a renewed focus on collecting better civilian workforce data and leveraging that to create a “People’s Industrial Base.”
“[Our] focus in the near term in on collecting better data and leveraging it to make good decisions on the civilian side and apply the lessons learned to create a ‘People’s Industrial Base,’” Rutledge said. “We’re not cloning or creating people, but we’re creating ecosystems of talent that can give us the people with the skills that we need at the speed that we need.”
But to create that talent ecosystem the department needs to better understand the extent of siloed civilian hiring ecosystems within numerous defense agencies, and how to link those systems and data together.
“We have a lot of headway to make on these systems we already have and understanding how we link those systems together,” Rutledge said. Due in part to the sheer size of DoD, that process may well be lengthy, but also very necessary, she said.
The goal, she added, is to create and maintain a pipeline for “a variety of career fields that are lasting and can grow based on the needs of the mission, time, and changing priorities.”
The talent management office remains in the planning phase on that effort, but has reached out to for-profit organizations, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and experts within the Federal government for insights on how to collect better data and use that data to create a more efficient talent ecosystem.
Strategic Talent Management: Forward Fill Not Back Fill
A strategic talent management plan is one that focuses on “forward-fill hiring, not back-fill,” according to Dr. Elizabeth Kolmstetter, chief people officer for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who also spoke at the Workday Federal Forum.
According to Kolmstetter, the mistake many Federal agencies make in their hiring process is filling vacancies – back-fill hiring – rather than understanding their talent needs and skills to build a capable workforce – forward-fill hiring.
“Stop using back fill and use forward fill,” Kolmstetter said. “We can look at the capability and the talent. What does [an agency] need and what are [the applicants’] experiences or the talent, and use data to determine who we need to retain and upskill and so forth.”
But the key to this strategy being successfully implemented is data. Collecting better data to understand mission and talent vaccines will help in “building the capability that we need,” she said.
Part of the strategy also depends on launching and keeping workers on “developmental journeys,” Kolmstetter added.
By starting people on a development plan, agencies can get them assigned to the “places that could use their best strengths,” and in the long-term staffers could stay on an ongoing development path making them more viable employees, Kolmstetter said.
