From fixing potholes to analyzing budgets, conducting health inspections to securing citizen data, governments across the United States are facing a worker shortage – but skills-based strategies could be part of the solution.
With U.S. unemployment at a 50-year low, all employers are struggling to find talent. But government agencies have been hit harder than private employers, at federal, state and local levels. To keep pace and improve workforce agility, public sector employers should consider taking a hint from their private sector counterparts—implementing skills-based practices.
The Growing Government Talent Shortage in the U.S.
In March 2024, federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. had 958,000 openings but only hired 391,000 workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, only four in 10 open positions were filled. And that trend began even before the pandemic.
The public sector is a significant part of our workforce, encompassing one in five U.S. workers. But governments operate very differently than business when it comes to hiring. Government budgets are shaped by a wide range of structural and political concerns that follow from being funded with taxpayer money. There are also mega-trends in government hiring that raise particular challenges in a tight labor market:
- The Baby Boomers are retiring. The aging population is an issue all across the labor pool, but government workers are older than average. Public administration workers had a median age of 45.1 years in 2023 compared to 42.3 years old for the labor force overall. So government agencies are more likely to have workers eligible for retirement.
- Fewer young people see the government as the employer of choice. The number of recent graduates entering government dropped 15 percent between 2001 and 2017. Fewer than half of recent college graduates are considering federal government careers, according to a 2022 survey.
- Government hiring systems are rigid in a world where skills are changing rapidly. The fast pace of technological change is not only creating new jobs, it’s reshaping the ones that already exist. Digital skills are increasingly in demand, but one-third of workers don’t have the skills they need. Yet changing job requirements in government work can be time-consuming, since civil service rules designed to preserve the independence of public employees and union requirements need to be taken into account.
In many cases, government hiring technology is simply out of date. More than one-third of U.S. states are using systems that are no longer supported by the vendor, according to a 2022 report by the National Association of State CIOs. Some 53% of state CIOs said generative AI is the new technology with the most impact and will “cause significant disruption in the next 10 years.” Roughly the same number said the lack of necessary skills in the workforce is their greatest concern about adopting AI in their state government.
So government HR managers face an unprecedented set of challenges: not only tight budgets, the loss of experienced workers, and outdated technology, but also the rising public expectation that governments will be applying the latest solutions to serve increasingly digital citizens and clients.
Skills are the Solution
But if skills are the problem, they’re also the solution. By focusing on what civil servants can do, as opposed to what they are hired to do, governments at all levels can develop the workforce agility to find new internal talent and tap into overlooked talent pools.
In the U.S., some 21 states and the federal government have taken a huge first step by dropping bachelor’s degrees from at least a portion of their job requirements as part of the “Tear the Paper Ceiling” campaign, led by Opportunity@Work and supported by SkyHive. By relaxing legacy barriers to hiring, governments open up jobs to the more than 70 million STARs (Skilled Through Alternate Routes) who have skills but not a diploma. But dropping degree requirements will have little impact if everything else about hiring strategy and procedures stays the same.
“Removing degree requirements is a necessary step but only the first step in the process,” said Dave Marsh, Chief of Staff at the federal Office of Personnel Management, at a May 16 event to launch Opportunity@Work’s new public sector portal.
Building a Skills Strategy for Government
There are good models to follow for governments who want to adopt skills-based workforce strategies. In a series of case studies developed by the American Institutes for Research, one major lesson is that moving to skills-based workforce management will be easier if you’re able to build the response into your current HR management systems. That’s true in both the public and private sectors.
Governments can draw on private sector experiences, because corporate employers have similar challenges when it comes to adapting to new circumstances. For example, Baker Hughes has partnered with SkyHive in one of the largest examples of a skills-based transition driven by real-time skills intelligence. The 55,000-employee company made its reputation as an oil company, but now wants to pivot to green energy and energy technology. Understanding what skills are required, whether your employees have them, and how to get them, is fundamental to Baker Hughes’ transition.
It isn’t only a matter of talent acquisition, either. Reskilling or upskilling current workers to enable the company to go in a different direction is essential – and it may be even more crucial in the public sector, where firing current workers and rehiring new ones may not be an option. Leveraging the “adjacent skills” workers already have makes the transition much easier.
“Drilling expertise or drilling engineering is a core skill that we have,” said Baker Hughes former CTO Elie Alam. “It’s a big part of our business. The skill required for this is very adjacent to drilling for carbon capture, burying, and storage…you can transfer those adjacent skills from one job to the next, but you need the skills granularity to identify the resources you can bring from one job to the next.”
For more examples of how SkyHive by Cornerstone uses skills adjacency to help the world’s largest companies transition to greener practices, check out our case study with Accenture, Walmart, Unilever, and the World Economic Forum here.
Once the adjacent skills and new skills are identified, a sophisticated learning and development system can allow organizations to bridge the gap. A system like the one Cornerstone provides to the Ventura County Fire Department, where firefighters need 600 hours of recurrent training a year, can be used to upskill and reskill staff.
Four Questions to Ask in Building a Government Skills-Based Workforce Strategy
For any organization to develop a skills-based workforce development strategy, it should consider four questions, laid out in SkyHive’s Horizons process for organizations transitioning to a skills-based approach:
First, what skills do we need?
This goes beyond the common governmental problem of being shorthanded. It’s a question of how your agency’s mission is changing and whether your workforce has the skills to change with it.
An important part of the strategy is taking job descriptions and breaking them down into their component skills, so skills are considered on their own and in detail.
Using real-time labor market data drawn from job postings is one way to benchmark your needs against the broader job market. Analysis of job postings will provide a much faster and more nuanced view of changing skills than the surveys used in traditional government labor data.
Second, what skills do we have?
What do your workers already know how to do? Job descriptions and evaluations can tell you what your workers are doing now, but they can’t tell you what these same workers are capable of doing.
Like most people, your staff probably has abilities they don’t use in their current roles. The skill profiles for your employees can be generated from their existing records and social profiles, or added by the workers themselves. There might be a wealth of hidden talent already in your organization.
Third, what are the gaps?
This is where you can do a serious assessment of how to get the skills you need: the “buy, borrow, build” dilemma. The strategic decision can be informed by real-time labor market data to give you insight into supply and demand for skills. If there are a lot of workers available, it may be more efficient to hire or contract for help, depending on the regulations about your agency’s hiring; if not, reskilling and upskilling your own team could be the better option.
Finally, what action do we take?
If you’re going to build your team’s skills, then it’s time to lay out a career development and employee engagement strategy, with targeted skills and career pathways for workers who want to make the shift. Governments have some advantages in this area: three out of four civil servants under age 35 say they have the opportunity to work toward required licenses, certifications, or credentials while employed.
It’s critical that a skills-based strategy includes a nimble response. Skills change constantly, so a skills-based strategy has to constantly adapt to new circumstances. That, in itself, is a major culture change in many government agencies. Putting in place a regular review process, with buy-in from senior leadership, is essential to making skills-based workforce planning more than another directive. Fortunately there are best-practices for cultural change in government, from City Hall to statehouses to federal agencies.
Skills-based workforce planning isn’t just a good idea – it’s an imperative for all levels of government in the U.S. and every country. And the reward will be a civil service that’s prepared for the challenges of the future.
To find out more about how governments can implement a skills-based human resources strategy, contact SkyHive today.
About SkyHive by Cornerstone
Recognized by the World Economic Forum and Gartner for our contributions to the future of work, SkyHive enables organizations and communities worldwide from Best Buy, the Government of Canada, and Collège La Cité to Unilever and Zinnia transition from jobs to skills, backed by partnerships including Accenture, SAP, and Workday and non-profits Opportunity@Work and JobsFirstNYC. Learn more about how to unleash human potential at skyhive.ai.
Cornerstone OnDemand Inc. acquired SkyHive on May 22, 2024. See the press release for the exciting news. Cornerstone Galaxy, the complete AI-powered Workforce Agility platform, allows organizations to identify skills gaps and development opportunities, retain and engage top talent, and provide multi-modal learning experiences to meet the diverse needs of the modern workforce. Learn more at csod.com.
