Developing the Federal Natural Resource Workforce

Washington Watch, January 2004

Robert E. Gropp

Awareness of the government’s need to replenish a scientific, technical, and managerial workforce soon to be decimated by the retirement of the baby-boom generation has grown in recent years. Decisionmakers are pondering how best to recruit and retain that new workforce. Recently, federal natural resource management and science agencies, such as the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, began crafting workforce development and recruitment plans.

According to Robert A. Robinson, managing director of the General Accounting Office’s Natural Resources and Environment Team, federal science and natural resource agencies stand to lose significant percentages of their senior management and scientific workforce by 2007. Citing recent GAO evaluations of natural resource agency workforce data, Robinson notes that over 40 percent of government employees are over 50 years old, and only 6 percent are under 30 years of age; moreover, 23 percent of these federal employees have more than 25 years of service. These data are in sharp contrast to those of the private sector, where 24 percent of the workforce is over the age of 50 and 38 percent under the age of 30.

The challenge decisionmakers face is dealing with this impending loss of human capital in an environment of growing budget deficits, negative public perception of public service, and declining enrollments in academic programs that have traditionally prepared scientists and natural resource managers for government service. To help inform the process, the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation (RNRF) convened “the first multidisciplinary gathering of leaders to discuss implications of current workforce and funding trends,” according to Robert D. Day, the foundation’s executive director. “Workforce demographic trends, more than a decade of budget cutting, and reductions in force raise serious questions,” warns Ryan Colker, RNRF program director.

According to Robinson, many of the workforce gaps will be in technical skills, such as those needed for work in fire management, law enforcement, and natural and physical sciences. But government functions evolve, and many workforce analysts suggest that, in the future, federal natural resource employees will be expected to demonstrate competencies beyond the technical skills most scientists develop in academic programs: communication skills, conflict resolution, and the ability to work effectively in an interdisciplinary environment.

A challenge for academic leaders is to determine how educational and training programs can best prepare students with the breadth of skills and experience they will need. Jo Ellen Force, professor and head of the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Idaho, notes that crafting a curriculum that provides students with necessary content depth, while developing communication skills and the ability to work in an interdisciplinary environment, is not easy. Force reminded participants at the RNRF conference that “professors have no trouble adding courses to a curriculum,” but taking courses out is hard. Some natural resources curricula “have more than 90 percent of the credits needed for a degree as required credits,” said Force. This leaves little time for electives, such as art history, which help students understand how humans perceive the environment. This kind of knowledge is likely to become increasingly important as the demographics of the nation shift and the public struggles to decide how to allocate financial resources and manage natural resources.

Some students, faculty members, and workforce policy analysts are calling for a review of current graduate education practices. Master’s degree programs tend to include course work and research experience designed to prepare students for doctoral training. The impression students get from these programs is that to get a good job, one must have a doctorate; thus, undertaking a master’s program in natural resources means being prepared to dedicate several more years to graduate school. Some workforce analysts say that this relatively new model of graduate training may dissuade some students from pursuing careers in natural resources fields. Instead of an uncertain but significant period of time in graduate school, students can obtain a master’s of business administration or a law degree in a fixed period of time, after which they can choose from a range of employment opportunities with lucrative compensation. Thus, one recruitment tool, analysts suggest, may be to reinvigorate professional master’s degree programs that emphasize course work over research.

This month RNRF will release a report with recommendations from the group’s meeting. According to Colker, “those on Capitol Hill who support science and natural resources will likely appreciate the report, but the real question is how the professional and scientific community and the educational institutions will respond.”

Robert E. Gropp (rgropp@aibs.org) is AIBS’s
senior public policy representative.

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