The Office of Federal Procurement Policy recently released its Annual Report on the Federal Acquisition Workforce showing the number of procurement professionals in government rose slightly less than 1 percent in fiscal 2006, to 59,997 from 59,477 in fiscal year 2005.

Last month's report, based on data obtained from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and prepared by the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI), provides acquisition demographics and trend information on the current acquisition workforce, which federal managers can use to forecast human capital needs in the contracting field and other acquisition-related disciplines.

The FAI-analyzed data shows that government hired more than 2,600 new employees into the contracting field for fiscal 2006. This hiring resulted in the net increase of approximately 350 people since FY2005 and 1,200 people since FY2000.

The number of federal acquisition personnel has increased about 3 percent since fiscal 1999. This growth rate falls far behind the more than doubling in federal contracting that has taken place during that period. Federal contract dollars rose to about $394 billion in fiscal 2006 — a 110 percent increase over the $188 billion in 1999 — according to recent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) figures.

The federal government now has approximately 28,000 contracting professionals in the general schedule contracting series (GS-1102), almost 19,000 in the Department of Defense and 9,000 in civilian agencies, according to the official OMB announcement.

"The information will provide a government-wide baseline of federal contracting workforce competencies, and it will help determine areas where training would be most beneficial to augment the levels and distribution of current contracting capabilities," the authors report in the summary, going on to say:

Problems in government contracting have existed for 30 years or more, Federal Computer Week noted last month, though many in the industry seem to believe the troubles are only going to get worse, particularly when it comes to the federal acquisition workforce.

According to the latest report's authors:

There is an increasing awareness that greater demands are being placed on the acquisition workforce to support the government's mission, and therefore new skills will be needed to ensure the workforce is prepared to execute all aspects of the acquisition process.

As acquisition workloads have grown larger and more complex, the authors echo recent claims from the OMB and others, saying the new statistics support observations that agencies must identify crucial skills, recruit and retain employees, and be prepared for change as the nature of acquisition work continues to evolve.

For example, the figures indicate that future retirement eligibility remains a threat. About one federal acquisition professional in eight already is eligible to retire, and that will rise to more than half the workforce by 2016, according to the data reported by Government Executive. The report shows that the average retirement eligibility for contracting professionals will increase from 29 percent in FY2011 to 50 percent in FY2016 (though these figures are higher in certain agencies).

However, according to Government Executive:

Agencies typically see only a fraction of eligible retirees leave the procurement workforce every year … with fiscal 2006 loss rates ranging from 8 percent among those designated as contracting personnel to 22 percent among procurement clerical and assistance workers, supporting the argument that projections of a "retirement tsunami" may be overly dire.

Yet recent refrains from current and former acquisition officials acknowledge that "the government is stymied by its inability to break old contracting habits," FCW.com says.

One change may come in the form of performance-based contracting, which require the government to tell industry the results it wants and allow industry to propose how to achieve those results.

Because agencies did so well on performance-based contracting last fiscal year, the OMB wants federal agencies to award more performance-based contracts and plans to use the acquisition method even more during FY2007. However, industry experts say the government should first learn how to manage those contracts.

Nevertheless, both sides seem to agree that performance-based contracting represents the future.

Some policy experts say an understaffed federal acquisition workforce has put pressure on an already-challenging procurement environment.

As such, the FAI recently completed a more comprehensive study of the civilian acquisition workforce for the OMB. In an effort to gather information for contracting professionals, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) recently completed a contracting workforce competencies survey; the competencies for this contracting survey were developed by an FAI-led inter-agency work group and re-verified in 2006 by a Department of Defense (DOD)- and Defense Acquisition University-led inter-agency work group. And the DOD has developed a modeling tool to help analyze its procurement workforce needs.

Information collected through those studies could help in addressing issues regarding the future of the acquisition workforce.

Source

Annual Report on the Federal Acquisition Workforce
Federal Acquisition Institute, May 2007

Additional Resources

New Acquisition Workforce Report Shows Number of Contracting Professionals Increased
Office of Management and Budget, June 4, 2007

Size of contracting workforce holds steady
by Jenny Mandel
Government Executive, June 4, 2007

DOD's high-risk culture
by Sam Lais
Federal Computer Week, May 28, 2007

Industry: 'Why don't feds get it?'
by Wade-Hahn Chan
Federal Computer Week, June 18, 2007

OMB to agencies: Use more performance-based contracts
by Wade-Hahn Chan
Federal Computer Week, May 25, 2007