In 2023, The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) continued to make strides positioning the Federal Government to be a model employer, transform its organizational capacity and capability, create a human-centered customer experience, and provide innovative and data-driven solutions to enable Federal agencies to meet their missions. Now that we are at the midpoint of implementation of the agency’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2022-2026 Strategic Plan, we are proud of our early successes and eager to drive additional progress in several areas. As the leader in human capital management in the Federal Government, OPM is playing a central role in empowering Federal agencies to: plan for the future of the workforce; build the skills of the Federal workforce; improve job seeker experience and attract early career and tech talent; strengthen customer experience for prospective retirees and annuitants; and leverage human capital data to help Federal agencies fulfill their missions.

Planning for the Future of the Workforce

In order to position the Federal Government as a model employer, OPM set a new vision for the future of the workforce, outlining five priority areas for the agency: (1) policy and resources; (2) research and evaluation; (3) training and technical development; (4) data analytics; and (5) stakeholder engagement. To advance these efforts, OPM issued 16 guidance documents to support Federal agencies in building diverse and agile workforces with the right skills for today and in the future. While OPM was shy of meeting its FY 2023 target of 85 percent for the percentage of Chief Human Capital Officers reporting they had the necessary guidance and resources from OPM to inform their future workforce planning, we will continue to develop and share additional policy guidance, technical assistance, and fee-for-service solutions to further support agencies.

Building the Skills of the Federal Workforce

OPM has strengthened the Federal workforce by partnering with Federal agencies to use surge hiring flexibilities to address workforce needs and launching Talent Pools to facilitate talent-sharing Government-wide. Specifically, OPM has helped Federal agencies use surge hiring flexibilities to implement the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Notably, OPM helped Bipartisan Infrastructure Law agencies fill 100 percent of their surge hiring positions to support this once-in-a-generation investment in America’s infrastructure and competitiveness, exceeding our target of 75 percent.

Further, as part of our efforts to build the skills of the Federal workforce, we also launched Talent Pools, a Government-wide platform on the USAJOBS Agency Talent Portal, to facilitate talent-sharing throughout the Federal Government. To strengthen agencies’ capacity to use Talent Pools to help meet their talent needs, OPM trained more than 1,000 Human Resources (HR) specialists on Talent Pools, leading to the creation of 10 talent pools across Government in FY 2023. OPM looks forward to working with HR specialists to expand the use of Talent Pools in FY 2024.

While the percentage of OPM Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey respondents agreeing that their work unit had the job-relevant knowledge and skills necessary to accomplish organizational goals increased one percentage point in FY 2023, OPM narrowly missed our target of 81 percentage points by one percentage point. In FY 2024, we plan to evaluate the end-to-end hiring model, carry out studies on current hiring practices and potential solutions to hiring challenges, provide trainings on the use of Government-wide Direct Hire Authority, and promote the use of assessments and structured interviews to assist hiring managers in assessing applicant skills. Combined with our publication of final regulations for the Rule of Many, which will provide agencies more hiring flexibility, and our publication of final modifications to Pathways Program regulations, which will help agencies recruit and hire more interns and recent graduates, we anticipate that these resources will enable more respondents to agree that they have the resources needed to accomplish their organizational goals.

Improving Job Seeker Experience and Attracting Early Career and Tech Talent

To attract the next generation of civil servants, OPM spearheaded a number of enhancements within USAJOBS. First, OPM developed a Federal Internship Portal housing hundreds of available internships on USAJOBS. Second, the agency also implemented a branded USAJOBS search page feature, which enables job seekers to find positions focused on their career interests, such as technology and artificial intelligence. Third, in support of the OPM Equity Action Plan, USAJOBS used a human-centered design approach to update the demographic details page on the USAJOBS website. After the FY 2022 implementation, the percent of applicants who agreed to link their demographic details to their application increased from 75 percent in the second quarter of FY 2022 to 90 percent as of the third quarter of FY 2023. Having greater insight into the demographics of their applicant pool allows agencies to refine their future recruitment strategies.

While our USAJOBS overall satisfaction scores were slightly below target in FY 2023, we are optimistic that additional USAJOBS enhancements, including launching a redesigned USAJOBS.gov homepage and improving users’ search experience, will help increase satisfaction scores and enable OPM to meet or exceed our target in FY 2024.

Strengthening Prospective Retiree and Annuitant Experience

OPM continues to make investments to enhance our customers’ experiences with our services. In my APR FY 2022 letter, I shared our plans to move content online to minimize call center wait times, and in FY 2023, we consolidated information from 15 separate resources and webpages to develop a new Retirement Quick Guide, reorganized our Retirement Services landing page to make it more user-friendly, streamlined frequently asked questions, and provided simplified information on the different types of retirement and survivor benefits. OPM also launched the first phase of a chatbot and plans to add additional questions to help reduce call center wait times. Further, OPM launched an Online Retirement Application pilot, a critical first step in moving toward a digitized process for applying for retirement benefits, in which prospective retirees from selected agencies may apply for their retirement payments electronically rather than on paper. We look forward to expanding our pilot this upcoming fiscal year.

In FY 2023, OPM processed nearly 100,000 retirement cases and successfully lowered the retirement claims inventory to its lowest level in six years. While OPM lowered the monthly average case processing time by 11 days compared to the previous year, the average time of 77 days exceeded our FY 2023 target of 60 days. To draw down the average number of days to process a case, OPM will continue to deploy process improvements, while simultaneously developing a digital file system minimal viable product for retirement applications. We believe that a digital file system will help our team members process cases faster and we are eager to launch the minimal viable product in FY 2025. While OPM’s Retirement Services achieved an overall satisfaction score of 3.45 in FY 2023, which is below the target of 4.05, we will leverage the results of the updated customer satisfaction survey, which we launched this past year and focused on the new annuitant’s experience applying for and receiving retirement benefits, to identify additional improvement areas.

Leveraging Human Capital Data

To expand the quality and use of OPM’s Federal human capital data, we released our FY 2023-2026 Data Strategy and launched a new data portal to deliver human capital data products and services more seamlessly to agencies, employees, and the public. Through this effort, OPM launched the following dashboards to Federal agencies: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility; Attrition; and Time to Hire (role-based). OPM also released the following dashboards to the public: OPM Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and Cyber Workforce. The average quarterly number of agency leaders, stakeholders, and other users accessing our human capital dashboards have more than doubled from FY 2022 to FY 2023, exceeding our target. We look forward to sharing additional progress as we continue to implement our FY 2023-2026 Data Strategy.

Conclusion

OPM plays a critical role in empowering the Federal workforce to meet the challenges facing the nation today and to prepare for those to come. As we reflect on the past year, I want to recognize the OPM workforce for driving the progress we have made and steering broader strategic efforts to achieve sustained performance in the years to come. As we have done this past year, we will continue use the performance data in this report to inform our actions and next steps as we work to achieve the goals and objectives outlined in our strategic plan by 2026.

Sincerely,
Kiran A. Ahuja
Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management