OPM pushes nontraditional career patterns

Federal agencies now are being required to rethink the traditional 9-to-5, office desk, 30-year careers that are emblematic of government service.

By Jan. 1, 2007, agencies will be expected to pinpoint and report on jobs that are conducive to unconventional schedules, telecommuting, shorter tenures and other modern career patterns. The Office of Personnel Management, the agency responsible for guiding human resources practices in government, formally kicked off this initiative Tuesday.

OPM Director Linda Springer told reporters and agency human resources officials at a briefing she estimates more than half of the federal workforce will eventually work in an alternative career pattern. Agencies will not, however, need to fill specific quotas.

At some point, though not immediately, the availability of modern career patterns will become a criterion in the quarterly management scores that agencies receive from the Bush administration, Springer said.

This is "an entirely different way of thinking about how we go out and market to what will be an increasingly competitive place for talent," Springer said. "Twentieth century approaches and mindsets are not going to be successful in the 21st century."

OPM is providing agencies with an online tool to guide the process. Analysis of jobs for nontraditional work arrangements will look at six factors:

• Stage in career, such as early, middle, late and retirees re-entering the workforce.
• Mobility, both among agencies and between the private and public sectors.
• Permanence of job, taking into account seasonal positions and student-filled jobs.
• Mission focus, including whether the job is attractive for specific ideological reasons.
• Flexible arrangements, such as part-time work, telecommuting, job sharing and nontraditional hours.

The success of the initiative will rest on individual managers deciding which of their employees can work under nontraditional patterns, OPM officials said.

"We believe that this is a change of mindset," Springer said. "Our job is to work with managers…to get them to embrace it, to understand it. It does make sense."

Lauren Ailes, a budget analyst in the Patent and Trademark Office, is a federal employee already working in an unusual mode. After Ailes gave birth to a daughter seven months ago, she and her husband, who also works at the PTO, began working early mornings, late nights and Saturdays to avoid putting their child in day care.

"This is wonderful for us; we're so lucky," Ailes told the audience Tuesday.

OPM brought in two other employees with nontraditional work arrangements. Robert Parker, a historian in the Park Service, began his career as a seasonal employee while he was in college. B.J. Palumbo, an OPM security clearance investigator, works from home with a government-issued laptop and car.

Ultimately, OPM wants agencies to highlight flexibilities in job announcements and other recruiting efforts.

Tuesday's initiative is the second in OPM's three-pronged approach to improve the federal recruitment and hiring process. In May, the personnel agency launched a television advertising campaign in the Greenville, S.C., and Flint, Mich., areas highlighting the range of government jobs available. Now OPM will air those ads in the Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss., and Quad Cities, Ill., areas.

Springer said the Web site to which viewers are directed in the commercials has received thousands of hits since the ad campaign started.

The final part of OPM's plan is to speed up the hiring process, which applicants and managers complain can be time-consuming and ineffective.

"There's no use getting people excited about jobs and not be[ing] able to get them on board for months and months," Springer said.