State workforce aging again

LANSING – In October, the Michigan Civil Service Commission threw a job fair at the Michigan State Police Training Academy in Dimondale.

The big selling point? Numerous job openings in everything from public safety to health care because more than 11,000 state workers would retire within two years.

Now, the commission is planning another such event as the state government workforce ages and an ever-rising number of employees approach retirement, especially in highly technical departments.

State officials said they have succession plans in place and noted "eligible for retirement" and "retired" are not the same thing. State-worker union officials, meanwhile, worried that retirements offer managers a chance to cut the workforce by leaving positions unfilled or outsourcing jobs opened up by retirees.

"It tends to be a way of balancing the budget," said Ken Moore, president of the Michigan State Employees Association. "And the workforce, the front lines, already have to do more with less."

A 2010 early-retirement incentive program ushered thousands of state workers off the payroll, but the share of employees nearing the exit has climbed yearly ever since. Last fiscal year saw the most retirees and fewest hires since the 2010-11 exodus.

About 30 percent of the current state workforce will be eligible for retirement by 2019, the Civil Service Commission said. That's the largest share of employees on their way out since 2009.

About 16 percent of the workforce is eligible to retire this year. Nearly a quarter of the state workforce is 55 or older, compared to about 16 percent a decade ago.

And the issue is more acute in some of the departments with the most technical oversight roles. Over the next five years, two out of every five workers in the state departments of Agriculture & Rural Development, Environmental Quality, and Licensing & Regulatory Affairs will be eligible for retirement.

DEQ spokesman Brad Wurfel said the early-out program taught his department "the value of institutional memory and the value of new energy and ideas that come with newer employees."

He said DEQ has since developed an employee engagement program that encourages training to reverse the department's tradition as "an agency where you have to wait for people to die or retire before there's an opportunity to move up." Now, younger employees can be more quickly promoted and retirees can be replaced more quickly from within, he said.

And "when that's our brand, recruitment becomes a lot easier because entry level employees see us as an attractive place to work," he said.

MDARD spokeswoman Jennifer Holton described a similar program there. She also said the department works closely with ag schools such as Michigan State University and uses social media — #MiJobs — to advertise openings.

"Bottom line, MDARD has a solid infrastructure in place to fill positions internally, but (we) are working hard on succession planning to meet our future needs when those retirements occur," Holton said in an email to the State Journal.

Retirements and recruitment have vexed other departments.

The state's struggled over the past several years, for example, to replace retired corrections officers, resulting in $45 million in prison overtime costs last fiscal year. New Corrections recruiting efforts, however, have outpaced goals.

Kurt Weiss, a spokesman for the Office of the State Employer, said the state has struggled to recruit qualified information technology professionals.

But overall in recent years, the state has been able to replenish its ranks.

Between October 2013 and September 2014, more than 5,200 people left state employ, including more than 1,700 retirees, but about 5,400 people were hired or brought back from layoff, according to the Civil Service Commission. That included 2,348 "career hires."

But officials also said retirements or other exits offer an opportunity to reevaluate their staff and look for efficiencies.

When someone retires from LARA, "the department and its bureaus thoroughly review the individual duties and work responsibilities of each position," spokesman Jason Moon said in an email to the State Journal. The position may be filled, but it also might be "reorganized and work responsibilities may be assigned to other employees and areas."

And, with a state workforce already the smallest it's been in at least a decade, union officials said that's what worries them.

"There gets to be a point where you say, how many widgets do you pull out of the machine before the widgets stop working?" Moore said.

Eligible to retire

As of Sept. 27, 2014, almost 30 percent of the state's 48,617 employees were eligible to retire by 2019. Below is a look at the share of each department's workforce eligible to retire within a year and within five years.

Source: Michigan Civil Service Commission

Retirees by year

Besides a mass exodus during a 2010-2011 early-retirement incentive program, more people retired in fiscal 2014 than any other year over the past decade.

Source: Michigan Civil Service Commission