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The Office of Personnel Management is updating the qualifications and characteristics used to select and assess members of the Senior Executive Service for the first time in more than 15 years.
OPM’s updates to the SES executive core qualifications, announced Wednesday, will take effect on July 1.
Acting OPM Director Robert Shriver wrote in a memo to agency heads that technological advances influenced the decision to make changes to the performance criteria.
“Given the rapid technological change since 2006, the ability to demonstrate proficiency in competencies related to artificial intelligence and data was assessed, in particular, to ensure all relevant skills needed among new executives were identified,” he wrote.
President Joe Biden’s 2023 AI executive order required OPM to review Executive Core Qualifications with consideration of data and artificial intelligence literacy competencies and implement new qualifications as appropriate.
As part of the updates, OPM added data literacy and systems thinking as new sub-competencies and modified the name of the technology management sub-competency to leveraging technology.
The agency also included interpersonal skills, building workplace culture and strategic communication as new sub-competencies.
However, Ronald Sanders, a former OPM associate director who served in the SES for more than 20 years, thinks the incoming Trump administration should “junk” the updates and “start over with some alacrity.”
“You can’t lead in this world without having to do so without formal authority — without confronting people who don’t work for you in order to get them to follow you and get things done,” he said. “And the OPM ECQs just don’t do that.”
Sanders argued in a Jan. 7 commentary for Government Executive that OPM should establish an ECQ category focused on skills and experiences in leading “inter” operations (e.g. interagency, interdepartmental, intergovernmental, international).
Jason Briefel, the director of policy and outreach at the Senior Executives Association, expects the planned updates will look different when they are ultimately implemented.
“The rubber meets the road in terms of how do we document that people have those skills? How do they reflect and show that to OPM if there are new people trying to enter the SES? How do we make sure that we’re ensuring that someone who’s been a senior executive for a while has the opportunity — and agencies have the resources and focus and learning programs in place — to make sure that the executives are up to speed with the skills that OPM is demanding today?” he said. “None of these areas, frankly, have been priorities at the center of government, and a lot of the implementation is left to agencies to figure out how they want to operationalize this.”
Prior to updating the ECQs, OPM over the course of a year examined more than 55 competency models from different organizations, held panels with SES members from more than 45 agencies and conducted a survey of the SES that elicited more than 2,600 responses.
OPM said that its Executive Services and Workforce Development Center would provide office hours, training and operational support to agencies to ensure the new ECQs are successfully implemented.
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