The Future SSC Pacific Civil Service Workforce
Abstract
Current demographic trends for SPAWAR Systems Center San Diego (SSC San Diego) accessions versus separations remain unclear, particularly as the organization faces a potential retirement wave. This study supports strategic leadership decisions on future recruitment and retention initiatives by providing visibility into future hiring, providing understanding of the make-up and availability of qualified future hire pools, and assessing future Center demographic trends. The methodology for this study was a gap analysis. The gap analysis defined SSC San Diego's future hiring challenges in terms of its Science and Engineering workforce. The gap, or lack of a gap, was determined by projecting the demand, with adjustments for the local economy as articulated in high and low unemployment projections, against the expected engineering graduate yield from U.S. colleges and universities, California, and SSC San Diego current recruiting targets. Options were based on SSC San Diego's projected future recruiting pool within the 2008-2017 time frame. Two distinct findings were derived from this study. First, based on current hiring priority and assuming past accession and separation trends hold constant over the 2008-2017 time frame, SSC San Diego's recruiting will most likely continue to meet accession needs over the study's projected 10-year time frame. Recruitment efforts are currently focused on Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science. Second, SSC San Diego's science and technology physical scientists and mathematics workforce is changing rapidly. Over the last 20 years, the population of physicists has declined by 20 percent while that of mathematicians has dropped by 40 percent. Both of these disciplines have and continue to age more rapidly than other disciplines, with a median age of 53 years. Over the long term, this trend may negatively impact the Center's ability to maintain its current R&D as well as science and technology capability.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA485292
Entities
People
- G. Pennoyer
- J. Carreno
- P. Shigley
Organizations
- Naval Information Warfare Systems Command