Washington – Retirements surge, new hires plummet

The federal government’s long-awaited retirement wave is here, and it’s smacking headlong into the biggest hiring slowdown in a decade.

And it’s not just retirements. Overall attrition shot up in 2011, which caused the government’s total workforce to drop by its greatest amount since the height of the government downsizing in 1999.

With no end to tight budgets in sight — and with even steeper sequestration cuts possibly on the horizon — employees worry things could break down even further.

One federal employee — an accountant who asked for his name and employing agency not to be published — agreed that the loss of institutional knowledge is becoming a significant problem with the retirement wave.

“It’s the things that make the office run smoothly” that are being lost, the accountant said. “The people that understand why things are done, the people they need to speak to to get things done, things that worked or didn’t work in the past, how we accomplished things in the past that people coming in wouldn’t understand.”

The accountant also said that his bosses are afraid to fill vacant positions, even though the vacancies are critical, because they don’t know if they’ll have the budget for them in the future. As a result, employees in his office have taken on additional duties, which he fears will make them disgruntled and spur them to leave.

“I think that between people retiring who have institutional knowledge, and reluctance to hire due to budget cuts themselves, agencies are going to find themselves critically shorthanded,” the accountant said.

Other federal employees said they’re seeing the same thing…

via Retirements surge, new hires plummet | Federal Times | federaltimes.com.