The Department of Defense faces a challenge: how to replace a large number of retiring civilian workers and provide the larger civilian workforce likely to be needed for the impending U.S. military transformation's new force structure. One goal in meeting this challenge is to find effective recruitment methods. The authors offer policy recommendations for DoD intern programs based on interviews with managers of public- and private-sector intern programs, literature reviews, and personnel data analyses.

The Department of Defense now faces the challenge of responding to the imminent retirement of a large proportion of its civilian workers and the impending U.S. military transformation that will likely require a larger civilian workforce to support a new force structure. One way in which DoD plans to address this challenge is through recruiting "the best talent available." In its efforts to determine effective ways to recruit such workers, DoD asked the RAND Corporation to look at intern programs, characterizing DoD's current intern programs, identifying best practices for intern programs among private-sector firms and other government agencies, and recommending approaches for improving such programs. This monograph describes RAND's response, presenting and synthesizing insights and findings from interviews the authors conducted with managers of DoD and corporate intern programs, from a review of literature on intern programs, and from analyses of personnel data, and making specific DoD policy recommendations.

The Department of Defense (DoD) employs more than three million people. Nearly half of its personnel, 1.44 million, are active duty military. About 870,000 Reservists, composed of 410,000 Selected Reservists and 460,000 National Guard personnel, add to the active duty force. Civilian personnel make up the remaining workforce, numbering about 730,000. These three million employees are supported by an array of defense contractors providing a wide variety of goods and services to the Department. Moreover, the Department spends more than half of its $270 billion budget on pay and allowances alone. With a workforce this large, varied, diverse, and important, it is not surprising that its management is a uniquely challenging undertaking. The human resource challenges facing DoD have changed rapidly over the last decade as a result of many factors. A robust economy, civilian sector competition for employees to fill high-technology positions, declining American public interest in public service, major changes in the Department's missions and operational tempo, and a significant downsizing of the Department's workforce are a few examples. Reducing the size of the overall workforce by more than a million personnel, from a high in 1987 of 4.1 million, has left in place a very different force distribution - in age, education, and skill.

AR 351-3 10/15/2007 PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING PROGRAMS OF THE ARMY MEDICAL DEPARTMENT , Survival Ebooks

Provides a descriptive overview of the Department of the Navy's civilian acquisition workforce over the past decade and presents the results of preliminary analyses of data related to specific workforce management issues: retention, professional development, and leadership.

Written expressly for the text by leading scholars, all of the articles are either new to this edition or substantially revised. Each article focuses on specific–often controversial–issues, such as: the continuing debate over affirmative action and diversity; global developments in HR; managing HR in the post-9/11 era; HR challenges in the Third Sector; and the treatment of gays and lesbians in public sector workforces.