Employee skills drive organizational success in commercial business and government alike. They determine response to changing marketplace demands and the quality of service provided to customers and constituents.

For federal agencies, the need to better manage skills assets took on a new emphasis under The President’s Management Agenda. The Agenda is an aggressive strategy providing a focused plan for improving service efficiency from lessons learned in the commercial sector.

The Agenda requires the same accountability required of today’s private-sector senior management:

1. Track programs on their ability to meet specific goals.



2. Impose budgeting consequences for underachieving programs.



3. Demand performance data for continued funding.

Government agencies are being forced to ask themselves: Have leveraged their skills to address the issues and fulfill the demands outlined in the Agenda? More importantly, have the agencies tracked and demonstrated progress? Federal agencies have found that skills measurement provides an answer.

Skills Improvement Opportunities Revealed in Key Initiatives

The Agenda contains five “government-wide initiatives” for improvement across federal government:

1. Strategic management of human capital



2. Competitive sourcing



3. Improved financial performance



4. Expanded e-government



5. Budget and performance integration

Among these government-wide initiatives, the four below provide clear opportunities for skills measurement.

Strategic Management of Human Capital

This initiative emphasizes the need to “reduce the distance between citizens and decision-makers.” Among recommended actions are IT strategies for capturing skills of retiring employees, correcting skills imbalances, improving recruiting effectiveness, and increasing retention.

How can skills measurement affect strategic management of human resources? A system for objectively measuring skills enables agencies to test employees and identify where skills exist within the organization. Most importantly, the system provides an objective baseline skill level against which employees can account for their skills.

Competitive Sourcing

According to the report, “Historically, the government realizes cost savings in the range of 20 to 50 percent when federal and private sector service providers compete to perform these functions.” While competitive sourcing is a normal business practice in the private sector, federal agencies have struggled with processes and red tape that hinder competition.

But government agencies are easing that struggle and paving the road for the development of new government IT capabilities. Skills measurement is a crucial part of that effort. The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) held its first virtual job fair in April 2002. Candidates could access the site, find a listed position and its skills requirements and take an online assessment to prove those skills. “We had 2 million visitors,” says Ira Hobbs, USDA Deputy CIO, “and 18,000 people applied for jobs. In a matter of weeks, we filled positions that normally would have taken several months to fill.” One agency that achieved enormous success through the OPM job fair was the Department of State (DOS). They now use their skills system to fill multiple administrative positions and specialized IT skills in its own job fair initiatives

Expanded E-government

In today’s environment, the precise deployment of specific IT and security skills is critical to the success of any technology-related initiative. Agencies need an objective system for identifying the right people with the right skills at the right level of competency to achieve business goals. Not only is online skills measurement an e-government tool in itself, it also provides an effective vehicle for managing the IT skills that drive the success of other e-government programs.

In NASA’s sensitive information environment, IT and security skills play a large role in the daily operations of its systems administrators. With 3,000 employees and contractors located in 10 different operations centers, the agency needed a skills assessment solution that would be based on objective data and would be scalable across a large enterprise environment. The comprehensive test library and robust reporting capabilities allow NASA to use a consistent approach to measuring security skills relating to each of their operating systems and eliminates the need to determine equivalency of different tests from different sources. According to Robert Solomon, a project leader in NASA’s IT Security Awareness and Training Center, an independent online skills measurement system also allows for the use of any training supplier and leverages any in-house learning resources to fill any skill gaps. In addition, it gives the contractors the data to prove they can better serve the needs of the agency.

Budget and Performance Integration

Federal agencies continuously struggle to prove that their services are worth what they cost -- especially those services that are fee-based. For agencies across the federal government, skills measurement can provide vital objective data for quantifying capabilities without totally consuming the resources of program administrators and the employees.

NASA’s online skills measurement solution addresses both concerns, accommodating the time and resource constraints of test-takers and program managers alike. Results are made available immediately -- to users, managers and decision makers. Knowing exactly what skills they have on hand, managers can make better staffing assignments. They can also identify skills gaps and address them before projects are affected. Ultimately, skills measurement enables performance improvement, and gives agencies the data to prove project readiness and deployment efficiency to prospective customers.

As federal agencies seek strategies for meeting the goals of the President’s Management Agenda, skills measurement solutions provide effective options for improving recruiting efficiency, establishing skills accountability, doing more with fewer employee resources and maximizing performance results. In establishing skills accountability, managers and employees are finding new validation for the adage “what gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets better.”