In lieu of better data, it is easy to conclude that the defense enterprise struggles to recruit and retain STEM talent because it does not pay well enough and cannot compete with private industry. However, nearly every interviewee firmly stated that “it’s not the pay.” Pay, including total compensation package, is certainly a factor in any professional decision. However, the study team’s research suggests that STEM talent leaves the defense enterprise for reasons that are more complicated.
Like most professionals in the civil and armed services, technologists are motivated by a variety of factors, including mission and a drive to solve hard problems. This finding is consistent with talent management research which concludes that “purpose” is a key to retention. STEM professionals, therefore, will leave the defense enterprise when they lack purpose, frequently because they do not have the necessary skills, tools, and opportunities to solve tough problems in support of defense missions.
That was a great paper from Morgan Dwyer et al. at CSIS, To Compete, Invest in People: Retaining the U.S. Defense Enterprise’s Technical Workforce. People won’t always say what’s true during an interview. Certainly money is an issue. Double the pay and you’ll get higher retention. But there’s also that very real tradeoff with expressing creativity and tackling hard problems.
I think on the margin the authors have it right, the quality of work-life is a bigger factor than compensation. However, I’m sure the quality of work-life is correlated with a sense of ownership and decision-making. Creating a great work environment would mean tackling acquisition reform head on, because those decisions are simply not delegated to the working level on a human-relevant timeline.
I recommend reading the entire CSIS paper, there are a lot of insights. For example, less than 1 percent of Senior Executives in the DoD have a STEM degree compared to 20% of DoD civilians. This one recommendation at the end caught my eye:
Pool and centrally manage STEM talent: Rather than managing STEM professionals in technical stovepipes, explore opportunities to pool and centrally manage STEM talent as a shared resource for organizations. Create opportunities and incentives for STEM professionals—especially civil servants—to join this talent pool and accept broadening assignments in different organizations across the defense enterprise. Initially, the defense enterprise can pilot this concept for civil servants, using demonstration authorities from OPM and drawing on lessons from the armed services. Similar technical talent pools already exist in exemplar communities, such as the Army’s operations research/systems analysis functional area and have also been proposed for the Army’s digital workforce.
I don’t quite understand this recommendation. It sounds like they want to provide STEM-as-a-Service to the labs and acquisition offices. I suppose that would work if STEM professionals were pretty interchangeable across warfighting/systems domains. But I suspect that most organizations would prefer, once they found a suitable individual, to want to keep that person and develop domain expertise.
I think the solution is a combination of: (1) increasing wages; (2) decreasing time-to-hire and related burdens like security clearances; (3) delegating meaningful decisions to the working level; (4) invest in enabling and enterprise tools; and (5) focusing budgets and oversight on the conduct of organizations rather than stovepiped weapon systems.
These areas pretty well align with the CSIS recommendations::
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