Stop Throwing Away Term Employees
Please work with OPM, employee organizations, and Congress to find a way to extend the appointments of term employees and/or convert them to permanent status. Term employees come into federal service with great talent and heartfelt passion for our mission. We invest a lot in them: We provide training—not only required, formal training but also extensive informal, hands-on training and intense mentoring, often for many ...more »
Please work with OPM, employee organizations, and Congress to find a way to extend the appointments of term employees and/or convert them to permanent status. Term employees come into federal service with great talent and heartfelt passion for our mission. We invest a lot in them: We provide training—not only required, formal training but also extensive informal, hands-on training and intense mentoring, often for many months. While working for us, they gain experience, make contacts that help the agency accomplish its mission, and efficiently, and develop skill in communicating with agency employees and others regarding our work. But we have no way to keep terms when their 4-year appointments expire. At the end of this time, even if we continue to need their work, even if we have funds to support them, even if their skill and dedication continue to grow, we have to let them go. What a terrible waste! I have seen this problem repeatedly in my 20-plus years with the Forest Service. The last time it happened to my team, I tracked the cost: $15,000 to replace a “terminated term”—and this does not include the time spent obtaining guidance from my supervisor and local administrative experts nor the time invested by the agency’s HR staff. Nor did I examine the hidden costs of the months-long hiatus in our work that occurred during the hiring/training process. Why should we use agency resources to replace an obviously competent, high-achieving individual with someone whose abilities are little known and who will require months to train—especially when soft money is flowing to the project partly because that high-achieving term employee did such a good job? Ability to extend term appointments and/or convert them to permanent status will save money, make us more efficient, relieve strain on an overloaded HR staff, retain a huge amount of talent, and improve agency morale.
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