The Office of Federal Procurement Policy is raising the acquisition workforce tide in an attempt to lift all agency contracting shops.

In a new memo released this morning, OFPP is detailing four new initiatives to train, develop and retain contracting officers and other acquisition employees.

Christine Harada, the senior advisor in OFPP, said the memo ushers in a “new era of collaboration across the entirety of the acquisition enterprise” that will bring together not just contracting officers, contracting officer representatives and other acquisition workers, but also chief human capital officers and chief financial officers to create strategic workforce plans and retention programs.

Harada said in an interview with Federal News Network the memo is foundational to building the next generation of acquisition professionals with the leadership skills and innovation as key drivers for the future.

“To ensure we have a pipeline of acquisition talent at all levels and to ensure we can meet the challenges of the future, this memorandum establishes a blueprint for prioritizing the recruitment and retention of contracting professionals,” Harada wrote in the memo.

That blueprint is focused across four broad areas:

• The establishment of an acquisition workforce advisory committee.
• The requirement to conduct strategic workforce planning.
• The development of leadership skills across the contracting workforce.
• The creation of retention programs in each agency.

The memo is latest piece to the Biden administration’s efforts to modernize the federal acquisition workforce. Back in January 2023, OFPP brought the entire acquisition workforce under one training and education standard.

Additionally in August 2022, OFPP and the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI)  updated the system that tracks continuous learning points, moving from a homegrown system to a commercial one.

All of these efforts fall under the Biden administration’s new Better Contracting Initiative, which it kicked off November 2023. The goal is to give agencies better data and better tools to extract more value from acquisitions. As part of this effort, OFPP finalized a new circular, A-137, in May to establish a new acquisition data management policy that would require agencies to create policies, processes and tools for acquisition data sharing.

Struggle to hire, keep younger workers

Harada said while the need to develop the workforce isn’t a new one, the data is pushing OFPP to take a more aggressive stance.

“We trail the overall federal employee community, especially in the more junior grades. So for example, throughout the federal government, 21% of the employees are in GS grades 5-9. But we’ve only got 12% of our DoD contracting professionals are in those grades and only 8% of civilian agency contracting professionals are in those grades,” Harada said. “That’s the kind of thing that really, candidly, makes me sweat, and was really the impetus for developing this policy and working on it.”

One of the ways the memo will try to help agencies with this challenge is by requiring them to establish a retention program targeted to contracting professionals at all levels, which includes programs for their growth and development.

Harada said several retention programs already exist like experiential assignments, internships, cohort-based learning opportunities, networking opportunities, shadowing senior leaders as well as coaching, mentoring and rotational assignments.

“A lot of agencies have been putting a lot of effort toward retaining our workforce, and a lot of factors obviously feed into that and making sure that we’re successful. Whether it is improving job satisfaction, engaging employees, ensuring that we’re promoting career growth for contracting professionals, a lot of those kinds of basics are in place, but there’s a couple of things that we are also looking to bolster,” Harada said. “First is around ensuring that we’re promoting leadership training. We are looking for our agencies to promote the leadership and soft skills training for every level of contracting professional. As I have said before, acquisition is a team sport and it’s not just a technical skill set that we need our folks to develop, but obviously those soft skills and ability to be able to build relationships and do that kind of relationship management along the way is extraordinarily important for the agency to be successful itself. So we are going to be require senior procurement executives to collaborate with their CHCOs to develop strategies and plans to ensure that every contracting team lead and supervisor has either recently had or received leadership training and development, along with periodic follow up training.”

Follow the performance data

Another piece to this effort is agencies will be encouraged to take advantage of performance benchmarking to gauge satisfaction. Harada said there’s a number of tools that measure overall agency performance, whether by customers, vendors and/or other stakeholders.

These tools include Acquisition 360, the Federal Employment Viewpoint Survey performance appraisals and the GSA’s data-to-decisions platform.

“We’ll be offering up more approaches and metrics for SPEs to consider and think through how best to facilitate sharing of best practices for those efforts,” Harada said. “We’re also going to be offering programs for growth and development. In addition to the training, we will be thinking through what are those performance benchmarks?”

The new Acquisition Workforce Advisory Committee, which will be a cross-agency group that will identify and publish best practices around recruitment and retention, will develop an enterprisewide approach to recruitment and retention of contracting officers and other acquisition workers.

Harada said one of the first things that OFPP will ask the council to address is to collect form agencies their top three hiring challenges and top three retention initiatives.

“We’re also looking for the advisory council established some periodic orientation sessions for agency contracting professionals that are new to the federal government or new to the field, to orient them to the collective federal acquisition enterprise and help them understand what resources are indeed available for their work and career and to really help build networks,” she said.

Harada added that OFPP with the Chief Acquisition Officer’s Council and SPEs will ensure frontline contracting officers and acquisition workers know about these new retention, recruitment and training initiatives.

“Contracts are indeed a means to an end, and we are very fortunate to be able to partner with many members in the federal contracting community who embrace our mission as their own, to be able to deliver services, whether it be with things like the IRS Direct File program or be able to provide weather service information or Census information and data,” she said. “We need to ensure that we are ushering in a new era of collaboration across the entirety of the acquisition enterprise, working closely with our strategic partners at OPM and among our agencies and workforce, with a very specific focus on ensuring that we are building out that next generation of acquisition professionals with the leadership skills and innovation certainly as key drivers on that.”

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