By Geoff Fein
The Navy is looking at ways to reverse the downward trend and bolster its acquisition workforce, to recapture much of the activity that has been outsourced over the past decade, according to a service official.
“We have been in a downsized and downsizing environment at least since 1990. Some of our largest Echelon 2 commands, for example NAVAIR, their overall full time equivalents have been reduced at least 40 percent since 1990,” Jim Thomsen, principal civilian deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told Defense Daily in an interview last week.
“We have been in a long-time decline in full time equivalent…that’s engineers, that’s scientists that’s contracting officers…that’s everybody,” he added. “So when we talk about what are our challenges, right up front, the challenge is how do we get off that glide slope and do it deliberately and try not just to over react in a short-term sense, but do it more deliberately for the long-term.”
The problem is not going to be solved by looking for new workers inside the Beltway, Thomsen said. “This is not an inside Washington, D.C., issue.”
Most of the Navy’s acquisition workforce actually resides outside of Washington in places like Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona, Calif., Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, R.I, Space and Naval Warfare Center (SPAWAR), San Diego, and other parts of the country, Thomsen said.
“We are leveraging those organizations all around the country. They are the ones doing the hiring, doing the attracting, and the retaining of the engineering, scientific, and business talent,” he added. “We are counting on them because they are already linked to the region…local community, local school systems…to really do the heavy lifting…re- growing the acquisition workforce.”
The method the Navy is using, strategically, is real simple, Thomsen said. Those Navy warfare centers are the ones that have a lot of the engineering and business jobs that will provide the hands-on work experience to help them grow, he added.
Some of those workers will remain at the warfare centers, while others will come into some of the program management jobs in D.C., or at Naval Air Systems Command, or SPAWAR…wherever they may be needed, Thomsen added.
One issue is that the number of students graduating from college with degrees in engineering, mathematics and the sciences is continuing to shrink, Thomsen noted.
“The pipeline is thin. What that really tells me is that we have to do a good solid job of encouraging these students to get into math and science,” he said.
When Thomsen was program executive officer for littoral and mine warfare (PEO LMW), the office had a partnership with the Washington Mathematics Science Technology Public Charter school. “We worked with them, gave them an idea of what the Navy does, what the Navy needs, some of the fascinating things in autonomous vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles…space systems…that the Navy is engaged in.
“So it’s important that whatever the pipeline is, large or small, especially now since it’s small, that we get out and engage them,” Thomsen said.
While the Navy is looking to reverse the downward trend, Thomsen said it is recognized that there are areas that the service is going to have to address immediately. One area is in hiring contracting officers.
“We just established a cohort group…[we are] doing some new things at NAVSEA to bring in a cohort group, of interns and journeymen as contracting officers,” he said.
The goal is to provide them the same set of shared experiences and programs to work on and to keep them as sort of a “class of 2008” as they move through the system, Thomsen added. “So that we can really focus in on attending to that part of the workforce.”
The Navy is also taking advantage of an Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) program to fund some of these hiring efforts, Thomsen said.
Under section 852 of the FY ’09 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress authorized the use of 852 funds to retain, attract, and incentivize special areas or urgent needs such as hiring more contracting officers, Thomsen said.
The program is run out of the office of Acquisition Technology and Logistics (AT&L).
The section 852 funds are also being used in some cases to hire systems engineers, Thomsen added.
” We can’t wait 15 years to grow some of these system engineers. Section 852 gives us an opportunity to incentivize hiring some of these folks. It gives us the authority to bring in what we call highly qualified experts (HQE). These are even more senior people…at the top of their game. [It] gives us the ability to bring them in at the equivalent senior executive service level,” Thomsen explained. “So we can be a little more competitive.”
There are also efforts to bring on more cost estimators, Thomsen added.
“We are focused on cost estimators…to bring in the right kind of talent there,” he said. “The Secretary [of the Navy Donald Winter] has said we want to be excellent at estimating cost of what we are buying. We really lost a number of folks over the years. We need to rebuild that. But we can’t take 15 years to do that. We’ve got to go get some onboard now. We have been aggressive at the journeyman level and the HQE level.”
The good news, Thomsen added, it that Section 852 really gave the Navy a shot in the arm to apply the authorization to hire those folks.
The Navy will also use Section 852 funds to increase the number of interns they bring on annually.
Right now, the Navy hires about 400 a year. “With the section 852 [funds] we are going to bump that up to about 550 a year,” Thomsen said.
The Navy plans to hire an additional 150 journeymen and 30 HQEs per year, Thomsen added.
And while the Navy has been increasing the number of interns it hires, Thomsen said the 852 funds give the Navy additional monies to retain, recruit, and incentivize to bring them in.
Just as important as hiring is retention, Thomsen added. “We are probably not going to be able to hire our way out of this downward trend. It’s got to be a combined effort of aggressive hiring, but deliberate hiring, and retention.
“We’ve got to have folks that have had hands-on work. So we have to make sure if we are going to retain these people we’ve got to get them good solid hands-on work to do,” Thomsen added.
Approximately 16 percent of the Navy’s section 852 funds will go toward recruiting and retention incentives, according to the service.