How the Agencies With the Oldest Workforces Are Preparing for a Retirement Exodus

The imminent mass-retirement of older federal employees from the baby boomer generation is spurring government agencies to prepare, reports Government Executive . According to the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Department's Suzanne Tufts, HUD Secretary Ben Carson has "directed everyone in leadership to make the vibrancy and the succession planning of their workforce not only top of mind, but to start really thinking and cooperating together and working very carefully together to make that a reality." Such initiatives include weekly meetings by top officials and their staffs to discuss new vacancies and recruitment efforts. The department has assigned a human resources business partner to each program office to help hiring managers with organizational design and position management. Officials have collected information on both HUD's mission-critical and high-risk operations to form a hiring strategy. They also are pushing to incentivize the current workforce to stay longer by expanding a mentoring program to help junior employees learn from more senior peers and engaging in other "knowledge transfer and capture" strategies. Tufts notes HUD is using its growing function as a disaster response agency to motivate employees and diffuse expertise. "You can't have good programs without good people and without an adequate number of people," she stresses. "We don't deliver our services with robots and good people don't fall out of the trees."