Most contracting managers (indeed most professionals) will point to past experiences that prepared them for current and future challenges. Common sense indicates that exposure to diverse work environments experiences, tasks, managers, strategies, or knowledge provides a deeper background and preparation for subsequent broader career complexities.
Rotational programs are a way to obtain broader experience, in preparation for future higher management roles down the road. Once completed, such programs can better ensure participants can fulfill their current responsibilities, having received a stronger understanding of other perspectives and functions.
Today’s private sector workforce is ever more on the move. This will accelerate as the nation’s overall job growth increases. Today’s younger workers are less tolerant of the lengthy, almost insurmountable government hiring process and the long waits it entails. Applying for any government job can often result in no response at all. We are in an era of decreased government employment security and less competitive benefits, combined with a new workforce with a desire for quick career advancement. This is creating accelerated turnover in the government’s contracting ranks soon after a significant professional development investment. Societal workforce trends indicate that, unlike the past, most contract managers today may not remain in the government’s employ for the long term, posing particular challenges for a government that must hold onto their best and brightest. While a contracting issue, this is more accurately a human resources issue.
In response to such problems, innovative companies have looked at employee rotation as a strategic response. Instead of locking workers into single job categories, they move staff through a variety of opportunities. Job rotation can be a motivational tool, broadening individual skill sets and raising retention. Anyone can benefit, but in government its use has been limited.
Many successful contract managers today benefited from job rotations they experienced early in their careers. This usually consisted of movement within subunits of a given agency, buying command, or company. In limited cases, select government managers might rotate to industry or vice versa, but this aspect of rotations has unfortunately been rare. In the larger organizations, particularly the Department of Defense, they’ve had certain attributes:
- No manager could hold their employee beyond the rotational period.
- The employee was assigned a central “career manager,” thus limiting the ability of individual operations supervisors to keep an “intern” before their training and rotation was complete.
- Rotational assignments were part of a broader development plan that included formal classroom training and pre-determined organizational contract training goals (including experience in different aspects of contracting or acquisition).
Given today’s concerns of contracting professionals, we must incorporate greater flexibilities to qualify and hire the entry-level professionals and on up. Additionally, it is difficult for all but the largest government contractors to financially support rotations where their staff are gone, working in government offices for a significant period of time.
However, all agree that a larger education and training investment in contracting must occur. Contract management employee rotation programs should have clear, centralized funding and guidelines that fall across all agencies, so that everyone involved understands the purpose, design, participation goals, and key considerations. It requires a high-level, OMB-mandated purpose, plan, and measures of success.
Such programs may be costly, but the benefits will far outweigh the expense. Frankly, we can’t afford not to embrace this concept. Contracting job rotations will become a key retention benefit as our contract managers improve their skills and gain a broader understanding of the inner workings of a contracting organization from several perspectives and different agency missions. Contracts professionals could have the opportunity to touch everything from GWACs to schedules, source selections, sole source buys, acquisition policy, etc. The alternative is more of the same, as government continues to invest in new contract managers only to see them head for the exits and greater, short-term opportunities elsewhere.
