Mike Causey is on assignment. While he’s away, some readers are filling in with guest columns. Here’s the second in the series.

Nearly 30 percent of the federal workforce will be retirement eligible by 2017, compared with just 14 percent three years ago.

On top of that, young federal employees have started to notice that they’re reaching mid- to upper echelons of their government careers rather quickly. They’re wondering whether there will be room for them at the top.

Those are just some of the facts gleaned from Federal News Radio’ special report, The Reverse Retirement Wave.

The bottom line is that the long-predicted retirement tsunami is probably not going to happen, or at least, it’s not going to happen in the way many people thought it would.

During a panel discussion as part of the series, Jeff Neal, the former chief human capital officer at the Homeland Security Department, told In Depth with Francis Rose that he was more worried about a “retirement bubble” developing.

“You have a fairly substantial number of folks who are postponing retirement, and I think that can only last so long,” he said. “I worry about the trough that’s behind them, because we have now been managing the federal government’s workforce largely through hiring freezes and attrition through the better part of half a decade. … We’ve been through that before and we know the negative consequences of that.”

So, where is that next generation of federal leaders coming from?

We talk a lot about millennials on Federal New Radio, but who are they?

How different are they from the rest of the civil service?

What do they want?

How can agencies attract more of them and how can they keep the ones they already have?

Those are the types of questions many federal managers are asking more and more about the twenty and thirty-somethings in their offices?

The problem is when you talk about millennials as a group, you begin thinking of them as one big thing, almost a commodity or a line-item in a budget.

But millennials are not a thing.

They’re a group of people who just grew up in a different time. They have their own perspective and concerns. They also have their own voice.

Recently, In Depth producer Nicole Ogrysko and I began to wonder what that voice might sound like. Sure, we’ve been talking an awful lot on the air and on FederalNewsRadio.com about millennials, but we rarely, if ever spoke to a young fed.

With the support of our bosses, Nicole and I are launching Studio Y, a biweekly audio podcast for and about young federal employees.

The Studio Y podcast is not just a place to talk about millennials, but to listen to them discuss their concerns, their hopes, their successes and the unique challenges they face in building their careers in the civil service.

In the first episode, we talk to Annalee Flower Horne and Sean Herron about their experiences working in the General Services Administration’s 18F innovation lab. Listen to the first episode of Studio Y.

“I don’t actually know what the term ‘millennial’ means,” said Flower Horne, an innovation specialist at 18F. “I liked it better when we were called Generation Y, because that made me think that we were asking ‘Why?’ all the time and we’re doing a lot of science and innovating and stuff. But, I guess I think of myself as a federal employee.”

“I can’t make the decision if I want to have toast or cereal for breakfast tomorrow, so it’s probably a little early to say what I want to do in the future of my career,” said Herron, a product lead and developer at 18F. “And as long as I think that there are problems to be solved, I would like to be one of the people helping to solve them.”

Future episodes will focus on finding a mentor, staying engaged on the job and building a working relationship with your supervisor.

If you have suggestions for topics of discussion or possible guests, contact Nicole at nogrysko@federalnewsradio.com or me at moconnell@federalnewsradio.com. — Michael O’Connell

Nearly Useless Factoid by Michael O’Connell

There are at least two words that rhyme with “orange”: Blorenge is a mountain in Wales and sporange is a sac in which spores are made.

(Source: Dictionary.com)

MORE FROM FEDERAL NEWS RADIO:

Mentoring helps young feds answer the question, ‘What’s next?’
When young federal employees reach the mid-to-upper echelons of their government careers quickly, they often question whether there is room to move up.

Feds ride the money, benefits wave longer than expected
Federal agencies are facing a reverse retirement wave, the opposite of the much- anticipated retirement tsunami. The Office of Personnel Management continues to receive fewer retirement applications than expected each month. Instead of a crippling wave of baby-boomer employees leaving the public sector, the workforce is growing older in place.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.