Academic and private sector experts laid out a list of recommendations today for Senate lawmakers to consider as they wrestle with the problem of helping defense industrial base (DIB) companies compete for necessary workforce talent.
At a Senate Armed Services hearing, committee Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., emphasized that the Defense Department (DoD) needs skilled and trained workers for the DIB, but that competition is running high in Federal agencies and the private sector for those kinds of employees.
SHRM President and Chief Executive Officer Johnny C. Taylor, explained that the challenges required innovative strategies to attract and retain talent in the defense sector. One solution to that problem is retaining and reskilling military service members and recently separated veterans, he said.
“This is an area where the DoD can greatly benefit … by retraining and retaining the officers and enlisted personnel who leave the military and are having difficulty finding work in the private sector,” he said. “If the DoD were better able to retain this talent, their existing workforce, it would help immensely.”
Taylor suggested that DoD double down on transition programs at the point that service members are preparing to leave the military. And he advised providing retiring service members with the skills needed to translate into civilian workforce jobs.
Witnesses at the hearing also keyed on the urgent need for a “forward-looking approach that not only addresses current gaps but also anticipates future needs” in the talent pipeline.
Pay, according to some, would be a good place to start.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., ranking member of the committee, said that DoD needs to be able to hire the best people quickly and pay them what they are worth.
“Hiring takes too long, pay is inadequate, and underperforming workers are difficult to terminate,” he said. “People get shuffled around to various offices to get them out of the way and good employees leave to look for better recognition for their hard work.”
Julie Lockwood, director of Business Modernization at the Institute for Defense Analyses, said that the way in which DoD sets its wage scales is based on structures set into place in the 1970s that do not resemble the current needs of workers or the Pentagon at large.
“I believe a far more effective approach would be to compensate on the occupational level, both with a view toward local wage but also understanding that should we need to draw workers into a labor market that’s relatively under supplied, it will take a higher wage to do so,” she said.
She also suggested that DoD accelerate “reprimand on cases of underperformance that does not improve with reasonable training investment.” That course, she explained, could solve some retention issues DoD continues to face.
“The bottom line is that if high performers are compensated, promoted, and otherwise treated the same as mediocre performers, then [they] will be discouraged and take their talent somewhere else,” Lockwood said.
Simon H. Johnson, professor of Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, also delved into this economic aspect, shedding light on how entrepreneurial approaches could bolster the workforce.
“I think we are underinvesting in managerial capabilities across a large part of our economy … which is very counterproductive from an economic and from a national security point of view,” he said.
He went on to suggest that DoD must invest more in workforce development programs.
Taylor echoed this sentiment, and talked about difficulties within the DIB in keeping people in middle management.
“That’s partly because we assume that just because someone is a great mechanic, they will be a great manager of mechanics,” he said. “We don’t invest in training how to be a great people manager. Then everyone is unhappy, no one wins, and that has led to a retention problem. Employers must invest in people management.”
