Young Americans by the thousands followed President Kennedy’s inaugural advice in the 1960s and asked themselves what they could do for their country. Service in the federal government seemed like the perfect way to heed the president’s rallying call. Stoked by passionate rhetoric of service to humankind, idealistic twenty-somethings signed on for federal employment in droves.

Back then, federal service did not conjure up Dilbertesque visions of office workers tapping on keyboards in windowless pods or swimming in bureaucratic red tape. On the contrary, federal workers were at the helm of some of the century’s most exciting and important work, waging war on poverty and landing on the moon.

Now the baby boomers are getting ready to retire. Born between 1946 and 1964, the oldest of the generation turn 60 this year, and the federal government will be

We’re going to be more aggressive about recruitment at PBGC. ...It’s one of our priorities. — Michele Pilipovich (Image: Drake Sorey)

losing huge labor and knowledge resources.

That’s why everybody in government these days seems to be talking about succession planning and finding ways to develop new leaders.

The federal succession problem is “the big gorilla. It’s huge. What [federal employees] deliver or don’t deliver affects so many people.”
—AMA’s Dick Morton

Dick Morton, executive director of the American Management Association’s Federal Learning Institute, calls the federal government’s looming succession problem “the big gorilla. It’s huge. What [federal employees] deliver or don’t deliver affects so many people.”

The statistics facing succession planners are pretty scary. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 50 percent of federal employees and 70 percent of federal senior managers will be eligible to retire by 2010. The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2003 that by 2007, 55 percent of Senior Executive Service employees will retire or leave office.

The federal workforce, once so fresh-faced and enthusiastic, is now undeniably graying.

The greatest number of federal employees fall into the 50- to 54-year-old range, said Claire Schooley, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. This is a considerably older majority than in the private sector, where most employees are 40 to 44. The Office of Personnel Management estimates the peak of the federal retirement wave will occur around 2008 through 2010.

Gradual change. OPM director Linda Springer often describes the impending retirement wave as a “tsunami,” though others think it will be a more gradual change. “I think it will be more of a slow thaw than a bolt of lightning,” said Christopher Faust, executive vice president of Softscape Inc. of Wayland, Mass., a company that provides human-capital management services.

Tsunami or no, one thing is certain: When the boomers finally do leave federal service, they will be taking with them vast reserves of knowledge, unless plans are made to harvest it.

The knowledge drain from the boomer retirement wave already has had some far-reaching consequences. As author David DeLong reports in his book, Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce (Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), NASA lost the plans for the Saturn 5 rocket, which was used to launch the lunar landing craft. No one knows where the plans are. DeLong writes:

In an era of cost-cutting and downsizing, the engineers who designed the huge Saturn 5 rocket ... were encouraged to take early retirement from the space program. With them went years of experience and expertise about the design trade-offs that had been made in building the Saturn rockets. Also lost were what appear to be the last set of critical blueprints for the Saturn booster, which was the only rocket ever built with enough thrust to launch a manned lunar payload.

According to DeLong, “the blueprints were actually lost in some giant document warehouse in Georgia. But the point is, no one knows where they are.” Should NASA return to the moon, the space agency will have to start from scratch.

Especially daunting is the need to transfer the boomers’ tacit knowledge, which is knowledge gained through experience, said Susie Trinkle, a government employee who did research for her doctoral dissertation about succession and knowledge transfer at the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Tacit knowledge is usually oral and makes up the unwritten rules of an organization, which are much more likely to be shared around a water cooler than through PowerPoint slides.

Some agencies are adopting storytelling techniques as a means of exchanging tacit knowledge, Trinkle said. Almost every profession uses some form of storytelling, she said. “Economists’ stories are models. Scientists’ stories are experiments. Executives’ stories are business plans.”

Lynne Feingold, a government consultant, also advocates storytelling to share tacit knowledge. Feingold successfully used storytelling techniques to inform senior executives at the General Services Administration about problems with their smart-card program in 1997.

And even though tacit knowledge can include technical knowledge, Trinkle is unimpressed with technology as a means for transferring tacit knowledge.

“What doesn’t work well is when they try to make an ‘expert system’ to transfer knowledge,” Trinkle said. “It’s the nature of the knowledge. It’s very difficult to put something like that into a machine.”

Leaving records. Trinkle concedes that technology could be useful in tacit knowledge transfer under a few circumstances. For example, videotaping someone explaining how they did a particular task has been effective. Communication technologies or other ways to tie people together through portals also have been helpful, she said.

The government’s institutional knowledge—the unwritten rules of how to get things done—is what needs to be captured before the retirement wave hits full force, OPM’s Springer said. This is the knowledge that “you don’t come out of school with your degree knowing.”

Michael Novak, senior analyst with IRS’ Office of Research, thinks it’s interesting to compare the approaching brain drain as federal employees retire to the Year 2000 computer crisis.

“The Y2K issue was recognized as an issue early on. Leaders in all sectors were proactive in addressing it. And the problems that could have occurred never materialized,” Novak said. “But Y2K was mainly a technical issue and could be addressed using primarily technical means. The brain drain is a cultural issue and needs to be addressed through means that work within the context of each organization’s unique culture. Technical fixes will not work.” And cultural changes take longer than technical fixes, sometimes as long as seven years, he said.

With their characteristic flair, the boomers have transformed every aspect of life: school, work, family. The odds are good that they won’t go gentle into the good night of retirement either. The question of who will replace them—and their knowledge, both tacit and technical—is a burning one for federal human-capital executives.

Future patterns. The federal government is going to have to attract a new kind of worker: younger, technology-savvy and no longer likely to spend 10, 20 or 30 years with one organization, Springer said. The historical pattern of federal employment was that people came, found a home in an agency, got attached to the mission and developed a specialized knowledge base. Those days are over, she said. “That’s not a pattern we can depend on in the future.”

Federal government is not good at marketing, she said. Government “will have to become very, very creative about getting people in.” Springer said government will have to learn to accommodate a potentially productive worker who doesn’t want to move to Washington and work 8 to 5 in an office.

Part of the succession-planning problem is that the middle ranks, the obvious candidates to take over the leadership positions left by the exiting boomers, are a bit thin.

“Think back 10, 15 years ago,” Schooley said. “There were hiring freezes. The government didn’t bring in a lot of young people.” This middle group of workers from about 35 to 44 who “ordinarily would be groomed to be managers and leaders” aren’t there, she said.

Schooley also said the way government’s benefits are structured has encouraged the aging of its workforce. “When I was in county government, I heard people say, ‘I’ll hold on for 10 more years and look at the retirement package I’ll get,’” she said.

“And when you’ve been with an organization for 20 years, it’s tough to move into what in some ways is a more cutthroat world. There really is a pull to stay on.”

Many of the sectors that are having trouble attracting younger workers are ones that young people don’t consider glamorous, such as government, utilities and transportation, Schooley said. As one example, there’s an international shortage of mining engineers—not exactly an appealing career path for the MTV generation.

Young workers don’t usually think about what kind of retirement package they’ll get, Schooley said. Their concerns are more immediate. “They want to know about the environment they’ll be working in. Is it creative? Can I make a contribution? How will I grow? Will I have the technology I need?”

Workers in their 20s have grown up with the Internet, said Linda Lazor, senior vice president of marketing with Plateau Systems of Arlington, Va. They like to integrate work and social lives, she said. Government needs to focus on retaining these workers. “It’s much more expensive to keep recruiting new people than to get people to stay,” she said.

Recruiters will have to use some of the methods industry uses and reach out to more universities. “Government has to show what it can do and why it’s an attractive area,” Schooley said.

Ronald Sanders, chief human capital officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agreed. “We need to reach out more. We need to start far earlier in getting young people into government service.”

The youth factor. But Sanders doesn’t believe that the shortage of younger government workers is a result of a disaffected population of youth. “There’s still a tremendous amount of idealism out there,” he said. “We’re still a very attractive employer.”

As an example, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. is starting to feel the retirement pinch and has stepped up its recruitment and outreach efforts. In addition to using its internal staff of recruiters, the agency has turned to professional recruiters in search of replacements for the 73 employees who retired in 2004 and 2005.

“We’re going to be more aggressive about recruitment at PBGC,” said Michele Pilipovich, director of human resources at the agency. “It’s one of our priorities.”

Pilipovich has also seen the “boomerang” phenomenon, where retirees come back, either part time or as consultants. “We do see a resurgence of government service. People aren’t working for financial reasons, but to give back. I’ve been in this business for 30 some years. In the old days, folks retired, went on their way, and we replaced them with younger folks. Now we have an interesting situation. Baby boomers want out of the rat race, but they still want to do what they do best.”

Systems of outreach. Lack of outreach is not the problem, the IRS’ Novak said. “Most organizations now have sophisticated systems of outreach,” he said. “But achieving and managing diversity in the workplace does not stop once an organization has completed its outreach efforts.”

Some agencies are using social network analysis—a technique of mapping and analyzing people within groups and their interactions with each other—as a way to improve diversity in the workplace, Novak said.

Using social network analysis, managers can map how knowledge flows in and out of their organizations—who the connectors are, who is on the outskirts of the group. Managers can then more clearly see vulnerabilities in the organization’s knowledge base.

It’s important not just to hire women and minorities, but to develop and retain them after they are hired, Novak said. “Mentoring, career planning, employee support organizations can go a long way in keeping new employees from becoming the ‘outliers’ in an organization’s social network.”