More of the government’s new hires are coming in at the highest General Schedule pay grades, a new report from the Merit Systems Protection Board shows.
And the fact that the government is attracting highly skilled, experienced employees bodes well for future recruiting to replace retiring senior employees, MSPB said in its March 25 report, “In Search of Highly Skilled Workers: A Study on the Hiring of Upper Level Employees From Outside the Federal Government.”
The government hired more than 12,000 new employees in fiscal 2005 to fill jobs that ranged from GS-12 to GS-15, MSPB found. That compares with more than 8,600 new upper-level employees hired in fiscal 1990, the report said.
Many new hires were attracted to the federal government’s public service mission, flexibilities such as teleworking opportunities, and strong benefits package, MSPB said. The report drew its conclusions from surveys of 1,815 new upper-level employees who were hired in fiscal 2005 and their supervisors.
“Government service has strengths that agencies can capitalize [on] to compete for highly skilled workers,” MSPB chairman Neil McPhie said in a statement.
Most of the upper-level hires were needed to help with homeland security issues, national defense, or to use technology to provide services to the public, MSPB said. They were most frequently hired to be information technology managers.
The Defense Department alone hired 47 percent of the new upper-level employees in fiscal 2005, the report said. Six other agencies — the Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Agriculture and Treasury departments and the Social Security Administration — accounted for another 33 percent of the new upper-level hires that year, MSPB said.
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