By Geoff Fein
Just like its brethren across the Defense Department acquisition workforce, the Navy’s contracting office is looking to increase its workforce while the workload continues to grow, according to a Navy official.
In the 1990s, the Navy downsized its contracting workforce markedly to the point where they had half the civilian workforce as they did in the mid-1980s at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), Jerome Punderson, director of contracts, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“Which presented a challenge because the workload did not diminish,” he added. “If you are buying two ships vice five ships, it takes just as many people to do that. It’s not linear. So it was a real challenge.”
Starting a couple of years ago the Navy began to rebuild that workforce, Punderson said. “We have a lot of people with a lot of experience and a lot of people with a little experience. What we don’t have is a lot of people in the middle.”
The way the Navy has traditionally trained its contracting people has been mostly through on-the-job training, Punderson noted. And the people who provide a lot of that on the job training were the people in the middle of the workforce. “So we have to capture the knowledge of our senior workforce and try to find a way to educate the junior workforce before the senior workforce retires,” he added.
Congress has been providing funding to help build the acquisition workforce, Punderson said. The Defense Acquisition University does a lot of the training, and Punderson said the Navy is working with its workforce to capture the knowledge of the senior people.
And the Navy has been bringing back recently retired contracting personnel to do some training, he added. “[We] bring them back into government for a year or two to be mentors and trainers.”
And Punderson will head out to recruiting events with his counterparts on the engineering side, to recruit business people.
But the challenges Punderson is facing are not the same as those that the technical side is facing, he said.
That’s because people entering the contracting field don’t require a highly specialized degree, Punderson said. “There are a lot of people who meet the minimum.”
To enter the world of contracting, a person only needs a Bachelors degree and a minimum of 24 business credits, he pointed out.
“That’s all the law requires you to have, and must be a U.S. citizen. But there are a lot more of those than U.S. citizen engineers graduating,” Punderson said.
But that also means that unlike the engineering side, Punderson doesn’t need to reach out to high schools to encourage students to pursue a career in contracting.
“I can go when they are juniors in college, talk to them about opportunities, put up a picture of an aircraft carrier and say ‘Ever buy one of these?’ We don’t have any problem selling that,” he said. “There are enough candidates coming out of college, it’s a matter of training them.”
And not just training them, but keeping them too, Punderson said.
After 9/11, when the Navy was beginning to build up its workforce, the Bush administration and congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The new agency created a huge demand for contracting people, Punderson said. Many of those workers came from the Navy.
And when the Army began to reconstitute its workforce, they drew personnel from the Navy’s ranks, he added.
“There are universities that teach government contracting, but then there is going out and doing government contracting,” Punderson said. “You really have to be in the workforce.”
NAVSEA has an intern program, managed out of the Naval Acquisition Career Center (NACC). The NACC provides all the acquisition commands with interns, Punderson said. The contracting office offers a three-year internship.
“We have four purchase divisions, two buying weapon systems, one buying ship repair, and one buying ships. We rotate [interns] by a year at a time through at least three of those purchasing divisions to expose them to the different commodity groups that we here at NAVSEA headquarters buy,” Punderson explained. “So that when they graduate we can place them in any of those three divisions and they can do the job. It’s a well-rounded training program.”
Currently the contracting office has 160 full-time civilian workers and roughly 60 interns (who are either in their first, second or third year of their internship), and 12 military contractors, Punderson, said.
The 23 field activities have another 500 workers, he added.
“We have the right number of people here, it’s training them up,” he said. “That’s a huge number if you think of a workforce of 200 people having almost 60 [of them] be interns. That’s not the ideal mix. So we have some very large intern classes that we want to grow through the training process.”.
This year 25 first year interns entered the program. Punderson said it is an “incredible training pipeline to try and deal with.”
A normal first year intern class would be 10 to 15 a year, he added