THE FUTURE STATE OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

In the past, staffing activities did not have to be highly responsive to program managers’ staffing needs because, once employed, people in government tended to stay in government. For example, as of January 2006 almost 65 percent of New York State employees had over 10 years of service with the state and over 34 percent had more than 20 years of service.

The major staffing concern in the state’s 2006 Workforce Report is the rate at which baby boomers are becoming eligible for retirement. Over 36 percent of the people now employed by New York State will be 55 or older by 2010. At the federal level, the average age of retirement for the federal civilian workforce between 1995 and 2004 was 58, and the average years of service was 26.3 years. It is clear that baby boomer retirements will create a large number of vacancies, and there will be difficulty replacing people in the hard-to-fill positions.

Because of the trend toward mass computerization and continuous improvement in business processes, future staffing goals will likely need to be flexible in order to adjust to optimized work structures and staffing patterns. Both worker abundance and worker shortage require HR managers to anticipate the need to classify new positions or reclassify existing positions to ones requiring new skills and abilities, to carry out special recruitment initiatives, and to redeploy and retrain existing staff.

Because competing organizations are driving up the costs of high-value workers, HR managers are experiencing shortages in such areas as accounting, engineering, nursing, and general health care. There are also concerns about replacing the large number of top-level managers who are at or near retirement age.

Meanwhile, with the increasing costs of health care and retirement benefits, organizations are closely attuned to the marginal benefits of each new hire. This concern has given rise to the increased hiring of temporary and part-time workers for less essential services and the outsourcing of some functions to expert consultants. These employment arrangements allow the organization to provide few or no benefits and no tenure protection, so the services of these workers can be terminated at will.

HR managers will likely find that meeting future staffing goals will be quite a challenge. There will be a shortage of available workers in the coming years to replace the large number of baby boomers who have retired or are about to retire. Hopefully, able-bodied seniors will do their part to help fill the gaps where shortages might occur by extending their careers or returning to the workforce as consultants or on a part-time basis.

In the near future, three staffing situations are likely to develop. The first involves jobs where shortages will present some difficulties, but HR managers will be able to use strategies such as redeployment and retraining to address those shortages. The second situation involves highly specialized jobs that will be very difficult to fill and will require innovative ways to address shortages.

A third situation, which is already developing in the American workforce at large, is the growing number of unskilled or low-skilled workers who are relegated to minimum-wage jobs. Many of these workers have great difficulty finding better-paying jobs because they lack technical skills or because jobs are being outsourced to other countries.

Although solutions for these challenges may seem to go beyond the power of the individual public-sector HR manager, the academic community must research and address policy issues to help find solutions and identify the role of the public sector in helping low-skilled workers obtain useful, relevant training and experience that can lead to a better life.