The talent challenges facing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are daunting.

• 20% loss of workforce over last 5 years
• only 3% of workforce is under the age of 30
• 40% of workforce will be retirement eligible over the next 3 years
• losing about 3,000 employees every year and only hiring a few
• increasing number of employees leaving to other agencies
• budget cuts and hiring freeze
• urgent need to hire employees with specific skill sets.

Over at the Department of Interior (DOI), there’s another set of challenges:

• coordinating workforce plans and changes across 10 bureaus in multiple offices
• 70,000 employees spread over 2,400 locations
• 19 mission-critical occupations, which are hard to recruit and retain for
• 46% of the workforce is retirement eligible
• difficulty in attracting millennials
• ongoing challenge competing for talent with the private sector.

While each federal agency is unique in many ways and has a unique set of circumstances and accompanying challenges, some common themes are evident. Generally, older employees are preparing to retire, there’s a huge challenge in attracting millennials and retaining and developing the employees that agencies do have is hard.

Workforce planning is a big part of the fix.

Federal workforce planning is critical, and that’s why most agencies are at least taking a hard look at what they need to do to plan better. Some have implemented workforce planning strategies and others generally at least recognize it’s something they need to do.

It was with this backdrop that Acendre hosted, in conjunction with HCMG, a webinar panel discussion with federal human capital leaders last week. Daniel Riordan, Chief Human Capital Officer at the IRS and Kermit Howard, Director, Strategic Human Capital Planning and Accountability Div., Office of the Secretary at the DOI, joined Miranda Ashby of Acendre to discuss proactive workforce planning for federal agencies.

The informative and engaging discussion, enhanced with live questions from webinar attendees, provided lots of insight into the workforce planning of the IRS and DOI.

You can listen to the webinar on demand here.