OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said a new competency model governing human resources positions will help agencies address skills gaps that have dogged them for more than 20 years. Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
OPM updates list of skills needed for federal HR jobs
Officials hope that the changes will better equip agencies to tackle skills gaps and help finally address the more than two-decade-long struggle to remove human capital management from the government’s High Risk List.
The Office of Personnel Management on Thursday announced that it is updating the list of skills required to be a human resources specialist at federal agencies, a move it says will make progress toward finally removing strategic human capital management from the government’s high risk list.
The item has sat on the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List since 2001, in part due to a variety of skills gaps that exist across the federal government’s workforce, including both staffing shortages in key jobs and instances where employees lack mission critical skills needed to do their jobs.
In a report last year, GAO applauded the Biden administration’s inclusion of strategic human capital management as part of President Biden’s management agenda, but warned that skills gaps within OPM’s own HR workforce could impede those efforts.
In a memo to agency heads Thursday, OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said the release of a new competency model governing federal agencies’ more than 40,000 human resources positions will better position the government to address those skills gaps moving forward. The new competencies list also directly fulfills a milestone within the President’s Management Agenda’s strategic goal to “build a modernized federal HR workforce able to provide credible, effective support to agencies.”
“This issuance will impact over 40,000 human resources specialists governmentwide in the human resources management [job] series and various HR specialty areas,” she wrote. “Since 2001, the GAO has designated strategic human capital management as a government-wide high-risk area in part because of the need to address current and emerging skills gaps that are undermining agencies’ abilities to meet their missions. This effort also informs skills-based hiring efforts governmentwide.”
The new laundry list of competencies highlights what skills are required of federal HR officials at each grade of the General Schedule pay scale, as well as skills required for more specialized roles within the job category, such as recruitment, employee and labor relations and performance management.
Ahuja wrote that the new standards are the culmination of a governmentwide study, conducted with the help of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council and OPM’s Human Resources Capabilities Executive Steering Committee.
Agencies are expected to take the new competency model and then perform job analyses of their internal HR positions to determine how they should apply moving forward.
“The attached human resources management competency model . . . may be used in agency efforts such as workforce planning, training and development, performance management, recruitment and selection,” Ahuja wrote. “Through job analysis, agencies must determine the applicability of these competencies to positions within your agency.”