With a new presidential administration taking over next year, U.S. government agency HR departments will encounter enough scrutiny in keeping their current talent management budget “as is,” much less increasing it. 

New administrations, after all, typically take a hard look at federal budgets to find ways to cut spending. Incoming agency leaders will want detailed answers to detailed questions: Where are you spending your money? What’s required, and what isn’t? What kind of ROI are you seeing? How do you track your budgeting? 

You, on the other hand, face building challenges in the form of Baby Boomer retirements and difficulties in recruiting young professionals. To obtain additional funding to respond to these challenges, you’ll have to come up with proposals that say more than “We need more money because, well, we really need it.” 

Fortunately, through modern workforce planning and analytics solutions, you can defend budget proposals with precise data which directly speaks to ROI-benefiting outcomes. Specifically, here’s what these solutions can provide: 

Executive dashboards. Avoid passive “firefighting” reactions to staffing developments through dashboards and reports, which enable you to stay on top of imminent workforce trends. With this insight, you can make recommendations for future direction, and then measure the impact of your decisions. 

Competency forecasting. You’ll gain additional predictive insights with a complete forecast of competency capabilities in all agency areas/lines of business. Toward this end, today’s workforce planning tools take into account anticipated attrition along with external market data. 

Skills gap projection and risk assessment. The shortage of available skills to address business-specific objectives translates to troublesome risk. With a skills gap projection and risk assessment, you receive breakouts of talent needs agency-wide, along with risk assessments for retirements and other attrition, so you can make informed adjustments in prioritization, resource-allocation and role assignments. 

Budget execution. Dashboard-enabled insights align current and expected budget allocations with planned hiring and attrition totals. Continuous updates help you stay on top of emerging trends so you can adjust accordingly while still moving forward with your intended strategies. 

Retirement eligibility analysis. You want to know about retirement patterns before valued veterans announce their departures, not after. This analysis establishes a retirement roadmap along with risk assessment, so you can counter skills shortages before they materialize.

It’s also essential for these platforms to configure to your agency’s unique workflows and processes – i.e. the tech adapts to you, not the other way around. This empowers you to capture all relevant data at every step in the system, so that all human capital action is reportable – every process or element within your people ecosystem is measured, planned for and improved. 

Subsequently, you’ll accelerate the identification of new talent sources to address skills gaps. You’ll advance strategic planning through optimal forecasting and risk mitigation. And you’ll see where potential funding shortfalls and excesses will emerge, to demonstrate outstanding budget-tracking to key decision-makers.

That’s when your talent management teams develop actionable information with previously unavailable insights into both real-time and future workforce challenges. And those detailed questions from new administration leaders will no longer intimidate you — because you’ll satisfy all of their inquiries and more, winning support for the budgeting required to ensure the long-term success of your agency.

Feeling the angst of an impending new administration as it relates to your defending your budget? We’re working with federal agencies to help them prepare for the presidential change, and we’re ready to help you.

Let’s talk.