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Office of Personnel Management: Opportunities Exist to Build on Recent Progress in Internal Human Capital Capacity

GAO-08-11 Published: Oct 31, 2007. Publicly Released: Oct 31, 2007.
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Highlights

Given the importance of the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) role in managing the nation's federal workforce, GAO assessed OPM's internal capacity for human capital management. This report--the third in the series--extends prior work and (1) looks at the extent to which OPM has addressed key internal human capital management issues identified by examining employee responses to the 2004 and 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCS) and (2) has strategies in place to ensure it has the mission critical talent it needs to meet current and future strategic goals. To address our objectives, GAO analyzed 2004 and 2006 FHCS results, summaries of OPM employee focus groups, and analyzed OPM strategic and human capital planning documents.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Office of Personnel Management To help OPM continue down its path of improvement with regard to internal capacity for strategic human capital management, the Director of OPM should institute a documented process for OPM's top leadership to monitor workforce and succession efforts carried out at the division level, to help ensure an agencywide perspective on workforce and succession funding, implementation, and evaluation. For example, OPM could document and report on how training and development budget requests are reviewed by agency's corporate leaders--such as the Chief Human Capital Officer or other decision makers in a position to identify the appropriate level of investment in training and development efforts across divisions--so that funding is prioritized according to the greatest needs relative to the agency's overall mission and objectives.
Closed – Implemented
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) reported in April 2010 that it had instituted a process for OPM's top leadership to monitor workforce and succession efforts. For example, OPM now collects and reviews training data to inform strategic investment decisions. Under the direction of the Chief Human Capital Officer, OPM reviews the data gathered to ensure a linkage between training expenditures and priority needs. In addition, OPM has a standard operating procedure for collecting and analyzing succession planning data from employee profile sheets.

Full Report

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Topics

Agency missionsEmployee trainingFederal employeesHuman capitalHuman capital managementHuman capital planningInternal controlsProgram evaluationStrategic planningSurveysTraining utilizationProgram goals or objectives