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Getting good acquisition officers via the Internet
The Continuous Learning Module will launch on the Partnership for Public Service\'s Web site next week.
By Dorothy Ramienski
Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio
The Partnership for Public Service is launching a new initiative to help your agency hire federal acquisition talent.
They’re incorporating an online module on their Web site for people who want to do business with the federal government.
On Friday’s Daily Debrief, hosts Christopher Dorobek and Amy Morris spoke with Tim McManus, Vice President for Education and Outreach at the Partnership for Public Service, who explained how the idea came to life.
More than two years ago, the Partnership actually worked with the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI) and GSA’s Center for Acquisition Excellence to bring together the acquisition community and look at how we improve federal contract management.
McManus says one of the results of that effort is the new training tool the Partnership will launch on Tuesday of next week.
It’s been called the “Continuous Learning Module” — it’s an online module to really help folks new to the contracting world, but also those who have been within government and need to continue to stay up to speed on how to effectively manage a contract [and] work with a contractor as a partner so that you get the best value and are really working as a team on a project.
In addition to working with the FAI and GSA, the Partnership brought in a number of private sector companies in order to identify how the module could be tweaked to help the acquisition worker in his or her daily life.
We looked at both sides of the equation. What is the federal side of things experience and where did they see some of those choke points? Where do corporate participants or the contractors themselves see where some of those choke points are.
McManus says getting to the root of the problem wasn’t as easy as pinning down a single aspect of acquisition.
The two sides are sometimes coming at the problem a little bit differently. One of the key issues that we kind of uncovered initially in doing some of this benchmarking and [in] conversations with the groups was that we need to open up the lines of communication better — and within [the] federal government, we need to look at contractors as essential components of helping us achieve our mission.
This means treating non-feds as members of the federal acquisition team.
McManus says the purpose of the online module is to create a larger sense of community.
One of the real pieces of excitement on the part of the Partnership with this is that, again, because we worked with FAI in the development of this — because we worked with GSA’s Center for Acquisition Excellence, the training ultimately is now going to be accessible through FAI’s Web site for all federal and private acquisition professionals. . . . So, what what FAI and GSA’s Center for Acquisition Excellence have done is really taken that written product that came as the result of a lot of the discussion and conversation and made it come to life.
McManus says this new module is one of several that fit into the broader training program offered by FAI.
The launch of the module isn’t the only event occuring on Tuesday. McManus says the Partnership is also preparing for a new, well, partnership.
[The] new partnership initiative [is] going to be a pilot project with a handful of agencies to actually look at how we bring in new acquisition talent into the federal workforce at an entry level. One of the most mission-critical occupations in government is acquisition professionals. Right now it’s projected [that] nearly 10,000 acquisition professionals [are] needed within government.
This is in part because the role of the acquisition official has evolved over the past decade. McManus says it’s more critical now than ever to make sure there are good people working in federal acquisition because a lot of the job involves managing contracts.
What we’re going to do is work with a select handful of agencies to look at creating some models and some direct pipelines into government for acquisition professionals at the entry level. We see it as one of the most critical needs that government has.
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On the Web:
Partnership for Public Service – Web site
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