All agencies at USDA work in the present, but look to the future. Employees at a number of agencies in the Department have been looking and planning for the future through their respective “Workforce of the Future” initiatives--and those approaches might prove helpful to still other agencies at USDA.

For instance, in 1999 the Food Safety and Inspection Service began introducing new positions into its workforce. First, FSIS food inspectors--located at federally inspected meat and poultry processing plants around the country--were converted and upgraded to technical “Consumer Safety Inspectors.” Next, FSIS introduced the professional “Consumer Safety Officer” position, which includes a science education requirement to qualify. According to Billy Milton, assistant administrator for FSIS’s Office of Management, both of those occupations support the agency’s focus on public health.

“Those occupations also offer current FSIS employees more interesting work, better pay, and more career options,” he said. Many current employees, for example, have acquired the college credits to successfully compete for Consumer Safety Officer positions.

In 1999 the agency formed a Workforce of the Future Steering Committee. According to Yvonne Davis, acting FSIS human capital officer, the Steering Committee was formed to help involve the FSIS workforce of today in shaping the public health workforce of tomorrow. “As much as possible,” she said, “FSIS wants to ‘leave no employee behind’ in this transformation.”

Today, the Steering Committee is a diverse group of about 30 FSIS employees working throughout the country. “I believe what is unique about it is that it includes the frontline employees who carry out our agency’s mission to ensure food safety and protect public health,” said Davis.

“One of its first accomplishments was to establish 11 guiding principles for the transition to the workforce of the future,” said Cynthia Mercado, special assistant for diversity to the FSIS administrator. “They have been adopted by the agency and help ensure that employees are treated fairly and consistently.”

“In 2000,” said Randy Wurtele, FSIS labor relations specialist, “the Steering Committee helped work out a mechanism, with the Union that represents inspectors, to identify those FSIS food inspectors in specific areas of the country who met the educational requirement for the Consumer Safety Officer position. This enabled FSIS to tailor its recruitment to ensure qualified employees could get the first crack at the 30 new professional positions.” FSIS now has hundreds of Consumer Safety Officers, many from the ranks of the FSIS inspection force.

FSIS Administrator Garry McKee has asked the Steering Committee to provide feedback and recommendations on a variety of issues with workforce implications. For example, the committee’s recommendations for an employee orientation program and regional training sites have been adopted and are now being implemented. FSIS is in the process of filling six regional training coordinator positions.

At its September 23-25 meeting focusing on career paths, the Steering Committee recommended a formal career counseling service accessible to all FSIS employees. McKee has endorsed the concept and given the go-ahead for a feasibility study.

“Employees are responsible for their own futures--but the agency can make it easier for them to build their own long-term career paths,” said Christine Sinclair, FSIS human resources specialist on the Workforce Transition Management Staff. “We want there to be only meaningful and productive jobs in FSIS.”

Other USDA agencies have initiated creative programs which focus on their own workforce of the future. For instance, the Food and Nutrition Service developed what it calls its “FNS University,” or FNSU, in part to offer various forms of technical, leadership, and human relations training to meet its perceived workforce needs in the future. According to Geoff Gay, a branch chief in FNS’s Human Resources Division, it is aiming to close “competency skill gaps” by providing an agency-wide training plan addressing identified skill gaps in a consistent manner across FNS. For the first time this training plan now reaches the agency’s many field offices, through a program of FNSU called the “Field Academy.”

At the same time, FNS is attempting to deal with “succession planning” in the agency by offering leadership training to its managers of the future--through a program of FNSU called the “Leadership Institute.”

Officials at the Agricultural Research Service knew that they needed a better way to lure the best research scientists into government work in general and to ARS in particular. So they devised a program, called the “Senior Scientific Research Service,” which gives USDA power to hire as many as 100 senior-level research scientists, at any one time, for ARS, the Forest Service, and the Economic Research Service through a streamlined process and at higher pay than was previously offered for senior research scientists. Ray Leaman, associate deputy administrator for administrative and financial management in the Research, Education, and Economics mission area, said the program formally commenced this past October.

The Sept.-Oct. 2003 issue of the USDA News carried a story on that program.

And the Human Capital Management Team in the Natural Resources Conservation Service received an award at USDA’s 57^th Annual Honor Awards Ceremony, in June, for “designing and implementing Human Resources policies and programs that will meet the workforce needs of [NRCS] in the 21^st century and beyond.”

“Because these agencies have been successful in applying creative approaches to their respective workforce planning initiatives,” said Sharin Sachs, an FSIS senior issues analyst, “other USDA agencies may want to consider these approaches--as we all try to meet the workforce challenges of the future.” •