FILLING THE BATHTUB


FIGURE 4


We gain further support for accepting 10 years of experience as the mark of an “expert” from a 2017 Management of Information on Teaching Resources and Employment Corporation Mitre Corp. survey of federal acquisition workforce members, in which 64 percent said it takes at least 10 years to become fully proficient.


Since 20 hours a week over 10 years is about 10,000 hours, it seems reasonable to define an acquisition expert as some- one with 10 or more years of “deliberate” (professional) experience. An histori- cal count of such experts in the AAW is shown in Figure 4, left. It shows that, after increasing from 2013 to 2016, the percentage of AAW experts has been steady since 2016.


THE EXPERTS


Here is the percentage of employees with 10 more years of acquisition experience joining, staying or leaving the AAW.


FIGURE 5


This provides us positive, qualitative evidence that the AAW is not currently suffering a widespread brain drain of experience, even though a considerable number of experts are leaving the work- force every year. Additionally, this finding is consistent with a 2018 Professionals Services Council survey of federal offi- cials from across the federal government who reported federal acquisition skills were generally increasing overall.


ALL ABOARD This is the distribution of employees joining AAW since 2013.


In addition to these measures, a couple of additional facts are important to keep in view when thinking about the AAW retirement wave. Firstly, on the loss side, most AAW attrition is not among those who are retirement eligible. Rather, about 60 percent of AAW attrition is among those who have not reached retirement eligibility. Ten, on the gain side, the distribution of those joining the AAW since 2013 has moved increasingly toward the younger and less experienced (those with more than two decades until they are retirement eligible). Tese distribu- tions are shown in Figure 5, left. Finally, and most importantly, we have seen that


86 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2022


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