By ELISE CASTELLI

More than 80 percent of the 3,400 acquisition employees who quit in fiscal 2006 were not yet eligible to retire, and officials want to know why they left.

The Federal Acquisition Institute will begin tracking where such employees go when they leave the acquisition work force.

And it will conduct interviews with former acquisition officers who left government or changed jobs within government to determine why they left and to help target retention efforts, said Karen Pica, FAI director.

The results will be included in FAI's annual report on the acquisition work force, which comes out in the spring, she said.

The early departures of acquisition employees "is a growing trend," said Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on government management and the work force.

"What is the government doing to hold on to these people?" he asked at a hearing last week.

Recognition for those who do well in their field, extra training for those who need help and career-long mentoring to guide advancement are key to retaining acquisition professionals, Pica said.

"People need care and feeding," she said.

The subject of government contracting frequently attracts negative media attention, Pica said, which can affect employees' decisions to enter or leave the work force, Yet agencies were able to recruit 4,000 people into the work force at all levels, outpacing the losses, she said.

The challenge is in maintaining that level of recruitment, said Frank Anderson, president of the Defense Acquisition University, FAI's sister training school.

DAU has created more than 50 partnerships with colleges to create programs that cover the core competencies required to be a government contracting officer, Anderson said. When students in those programs enter federal service, their previous training will count toward their certifications, Anderson said.

Akaka and Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, also expressed concern that the government's 60,000-person acquisition work force is not growing at the same pace as the government's $400 billion in contract spending.

"Americans need to know if there are enough people to provide oversight of contracts so that taxpayer dollars are wisely spent," Akaka said.

It's not as simple as hiring twice as many procurement personnel because spending has doubled since the start of the Bush administration, said Paul Denett, procurement policy administrator for the Office of Management and Budget.

OMB and the Office of Personnel Management are working together to analyze skill gaps and determine the right number of people agencies must to hire to meet their acquisition oversight needs, Denett said.

"The acquisition work force is overworked and does not have the appropriate training to do the job they have been asked to do," Voinovich said. "We in Congress must ... provide them with the resources they need to do their jobs."

To improve retention, officials study why acquisition employees leave