Aging FCC Workforce Points to Possible Gap in Skills, Institutional Knowledge
The FCC, with an increasingly aging workforce, could see lost institutional knowledge challenges with which many American workplaces are dealing, workforce experts told us. Some FCC trends stand out among other agencies, with older workers and fewer junior hires to decrease the average age of commission personnel, our review found. "People have always retired, but it's been onesies and twosies, smaller," said RTI International Workforce and Organizational Effectiveness Senior Program Director Jerry Hedge. "Now with the baby boom wave, it's larger numbers and that can be a scary thing."
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The percentage of FCC staffers at or close to traditional retirement age has been ticking upward. In Q1 2017, the most recent period for which Office of Personnel Management data was available, people ages 60 and up were 19.5 percent of the FCC workforce, up from 15.4 percent in Q1 2010. In Q3 2005, slightly less than 10 percent of the FCC workforce was 60 or older. High-level staffers at or close to traditional retirement age include Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp, International Bureau Satellite Division Chief Jose Albuquerque and Media Bureau Video Division Chief Barbara Kreisman. The commission has seen retirements in recent months of Bill Friedman, who held such roles as deputy chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau and Tom Wyatt as Office of Workplace Diversity head.
The FCC also faces a dearth of younger staffers coming in, OPM statistics and our interviews show. There's a "minuscule" number of workers under the age of 30, said Partnership for Public Service Vice President-Research and Evaluation Mallory Barg-Bulman. It was 4 percent in Q1. But numerous agencies, from Housing and Urban Development to the National Science Foundation to the EPA, have higher percentages of workforces at retirement age than the FCC, said Barg-Bulman.
The FCC said it "regularly review[s] the status of our workforce and take[s] action to ensure that we have the personnel necessary to carry out the FCC’s mission.”
Though an outlier on some levels, the FCC isn't alone in employing an older workforce, we found. About a third of all federal employees are eligible to retire soon, "so the retirement wave is a real issue that left unaddressed, will impact the ability of agencies to meet their missions and serve taxpayers," National Treasury Employees Union National President Tony Reardon said in a statement. He said agencies need to act to attract and retain replacement workers.
Few Junior Hires
A big driver of the issue that the FCC is hiring "few if any" entry-level staff, NTEU Chapter 209 (FCC) President Ana Curtis said. "Even 'new' employees ... are often career professionals rather than younger entry level staff," Curtis said, adding the number of nonprofessionals being hired yearly "is in the single digits." Meanwhile, older employees are delaying retirement due to financial and benefits worries, she said. She said the attractiveness of federal government employment is on the wane because of the way "many congressional leaders speak of government employees."
Not every agency is having the same demographic dynamics. The percentage of FTC workers age 60 and up has stayed roughly between 10.7 and 11.7 during the same time. Workers 60 and up made up 10.7 percent of the DOJ in Q1, up from 8.4 percent in Q1 2010.
The FCC figures reflect the dynamics of the baby boom of those born between 1946 and 1964, with increased numbers of people reaching retirement age, experts said. The federal civil servant workforce is older than the U.S. workforce in general, partly because inducements to go into government work instead of a comparable private sector job -- such as comprehensive pensions -- have declined, said Ruth Finkelstein, associate director of Columbia University's Butler Columbia Aging Center.
It's not a given that an older workforce automatically will translate to an immediate ramp-up in retirements, since increased life and health expectancies, plus economics, are driving up the labor force participation rate for people 65 and up, Finkelstein said. But if the agency does have more retirements, the effect will depend on what effort it has put into succession planning and on focusing not just on the technical and skills aspects but also leadership and management, she said.
Experienced workers increasingly leaving creates the potential for a skills gap and an institutional knowledge gap, Hedge said. Only in recent years have organizations begun addressing the issue, he said, saying many human resources managers indicate they foresee aging workforce problems.
"Threats of budget cuts, buyouts, layoffs and furloughs" don't help the FCC attract talent, Reardon said. He also said the agency should take more advantage of mentoring and upward mobility programs and give workers opportunities to move between organizations.
One of the biggest steps the federal government took toward addressing aging workforce issues came in 2014, when the OPM issued regulations on agencies implementing phased retirement programs, experts said. Starting in 2015, some began implementing such programs, which let people work half time and receive half their previous pay and about half of their annuity, while health insurance and group life insurance premiums are the same, a June GAO report said. The FCC said it's piloting its own phased retirement program.