The Government Accountability Office last week reported that although agencies in recent years have improved in their efforts to hire veterans, they have struggled to retain those employees at the same rate as non-veteran workers.
Since a 2009 executive order aimed at boosting veteran hiring in the federal government, agencies have boosted the ratio of veterans in the workforce from 26% to 32% in 2017. But in a GAO report released last week, the watchdog said that in recent years, veterans have been leaving the federal workforce at higher rates their non-veteran counterparts.
Between fiscal 2014 and 2018, an average of 6.7% of veterans left federal service, compared to only 5.0% of similar nonveterans. That dynamic carried across all methods of separation: 3.6% of veterans retired, compared with 3% of nonveterans; 2.3% of veterans resigned compared to 1.5% of nonveterans; and 0.8% of veterans were fired compared to 0.6% of nonveterans.
“After controlling for key demographic and employment factors, we estimated that across all types of attrition, on average, veterans left federal service at 1.2 to 1.6 times the rate of similar nonveterans from fiscal years 2014 through 2018,” GAO wrote.
The disparity in separations is worse when looking at federal workers who were hired and left within the five-year window examined by GAO.
“We found that newly-hired veterans resigned within their first five years of service at 1.7 times the rate of similar nonveterans,” the report stated. “On average, we estimated that 18.7% of veterans resigned within the first five years of federal service, compared to 11.1% of similar newly hired non-veterans—a 7.6 percentage point difference.”
Similarly, while 4.3% percent of veterans were fired within their first five years of service, only 3% of similar newly hired nonveterans were fired, GAO reported.
The key to improving retention effor ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
