U.S. Office of Personnel Management - Ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce

2005 Presidential Award for Management Excellence

Department of State

Strategic Management of Human Capital
Innovative and Exemplary Practices

The Department of State employs over 57,000 Foreign Service, Civil Service, and Foreign Service National personnel in over 300 locations throughout the world.  To maintain the U.S. role as a world leader in the 21st century, America’s foreign policy representatives must be the best the nation has to offer.  The Department must have sufficient resources to attract, train, promote, and retain the very best and it must be prepared to respond to crises around the world. 

To be the most responsive to crises, the Department needed to fully understand the skills and competencies of their pool of human resources including both current employees and retirees.  In addition to having full knowledge of skills and competencies, there needed to be a mechanism to quickly and efficiency gather and report that information.  In response to that need, the Department of State designed and deployed a unique web-based Competency Management/Expertise Locator System:  Employee Profile Plus (EP+).  EP+ is designed to inventory and document the workforce capabilities both on and off duty for over 43,000 Department of State Foreign Service and Civil Service employees and annuitants in a unified, searchable database.  This application permits the Department of State to know the professional capabilities of the entire workforce, to effectively manage those skills against present and future contingencies, and to deploy those skills as needed. 

Just this year, two major natural disasters put this system to the test.  In response to the Asian tsunami, the Bureau of Consular Affairs identified all employees with needed skills within 20 minutes.  EP+ was again used to respond to devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina by producing, in one morning, names of employees with a wide variety of skills ranging from employees who spoke Vietnamese to reconstruction managers. 

Self identification of skills and competencies (beyond their official records) and ease of access to populate the database are key factors for success.  Employees are able to complete their self assessment in about 15-20 minutes through an internal web portal while retirees use an external Web-based application. 

The core of EP+ is a competency dictionary covering 292 competencies, grouped into 17 subject areas.  These competencies include all the job skills present in the workforce and those that may be required or are of interest to the Department.  In 2005 the competency dictionary was updated to enable projection of future capabilities of the Department across all 292 competencies. 

This approach to knowledge management is both innovative and exemplary.  By centralizing this data and making it broadly accessible, the Agency has gained significant efficiency in their responses to a wide variety of planned and unplanned events.  Most importantly, this innovative approach has been shared with other Federal Government agencies and is easily transferable to meet other agency mission needs.