Section 115b requires that the Secretary of Defense submit to the congressional defense committees, in every even-numbered year, a strategic workforce plan to shape and improve the civilian employee workforce of DOD. The statute assigns overall responsibility for developing and implementing the plan to the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. In turn, the Under Secretary has assigned responsibility for developing the plan to the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service. The plan is required to include, among other things, assessments of DOD’s existing and projected civilian workforce, and a plan of action to address gaps in critical skills and competencies identified in those assessments. Section 115b further requires DOD to include in its strategic workforce plan specific information on its Civilian Senior Leader—senior management, functional, and technical—workforces. DOD’s senior management, functional, and technical workforces consist of five career Civilian Senior Leader workforces, which DOD relies on to operate and oversee nearly every activity in the department. These workforces include the following: Senior Executive Service workforce. Most of the department relies on these officials to fill positions with managerial, supervisory, or policy advisory responsibilities. Senior Level workforce. These officials fill positions that typically require less than 25 percent of their time to be spent on supervisory or related managerial responsibilities. Most Senior Level employees are in nonexecutive positions whose duties are broad and complex enough to be classified above the GS-15 level. Senior Technical workforce. These officials perform high-level research and development in the physical, biological, medical, and engineering science fields. Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service workforce. These officials fill positions with managerial, supervisory, or policy advisory responsibilities in the Intelligence functional community that falls within DOD. Defense Intelligence Senior Level workforce. These officials fill senior positions within DOD’s Intelligence community that require less than 25 percent of their time to be spent on managerial or supervisory responsibilities. Section 1053 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 added a requirement for DOD to include specific information on its Financial Management workforce in the department’s strategic workforce plan. That section requires that DOD include specific steps that the department has taken or plans to take to develop appropriate career paths for civilian employees in the financial-management field, and include a plan for funding improvements in the Financial Management workforce of the department through the period of the current Future Years Defense Program, including a description of any continuing shortfalls in funding available for that workforce. DOD’s 2013-2018 Strategic Workforce Plan is the department’s first plan that is to include information addressing this requirement. DOD’s financial-management workforce was added to our High-Risk List in 1995. Strategic workforce planning is an iterative, systematic process that addresses two critical needs: (1) aligning an organization’s human-capital program with its current and emerging mission and programmatic goals and (2) developing long-term strategies for acquiring, developing, and retaining staff to achieve programmatic goals. While agencies’ approaches to workforce planning vary, key principles of strategic workforce planning that should be addressed include the following: align workforce planning with strategic planning and budget formulation; involve top management, employees, and other stakeholders in developing, communicating, and implementing the strategic workforce plan; determine the critical skills and competencies that will be needed to achieve current and future programmatic results; develop strategies that are tailored to address gaps in number, deployment, and alignment of human-capital approaches for enabling and sustaining the contributions of all critical skills and competencies; build the capability needed to address administrative, educational, and other requirements important to support workforce planning strategies; and monitor and evaluate the agency’s progress toward its human-capital goals and the contribution that human-capital results have made toward achieving programmatic results. With the exception of the first two principles, these principles are similar to elements of DOD’s statutory reporting requirements. To conduct strategic human-capital planning efforts for the department’s civilian workforce, DOD’s Strategic Human Capital Planning Office used functional community categories to group together employees who perform similar functions. In some cases, these communities include mission-critical occupations. For its 2013-2018 Strategic Workforce Plan, DOD identified 22 functional communities and provided information on 30 of its 32 mission-critical occupations. DOD’s approach to developing its strategic workforce plan includes meetings between functional community leadership and officials from the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service, an environmental scan as part of a continuous information- gathering process, and quarterly recruitment and retention data updates provided to the functional communities. According to DOD’s Strategic Workforce Plan, mission-critical occupations are occupations or occupational groups that set direction, directly impact, or execute performance of mission-critical functions or services. Further, mission-critical occupations are positions key to DOD’s current and future mission requirements, as well as those that present recruiting and retention challenges. Appendix II shows DOD’s functional communities and their associated mission-critical occupations. We have conducted assessments of DOD’s strategic workforce plans since 2008, and our body of work has found that DOD’s efforts to address strategic workforce planning requirements have been mixed.February 2009 report, we recommended that the offices responsible for addressing DOD’s strategic workforce-planning requirements develop performance plans that include establishing implementation goals and time frames, measuring performance, and aligning activities with resources. DOD has since completed implementation of the actions it had underway at that time to develop performance plans. In our most recent In our report in September 2012 on the department’s overall civilian strategic workforce plan, we recommended that DOD include in the guidance that it disseminates for developing future strategic workforce plans clearly defined terms and processes for conducting these assessments; conduct competency-gap analyses for DOD’s mission-critical occupations and report the results; establish and adhere to timelines that will ensure issuance of future strategic workforce plans in accordance with statutory time frames; provide guidance for developing future strategic workforce plans that clearly directs the functional communities to collect information that identifies not only the number or percentage of personnel in its military, civilian, and contractor workforces but also the capabilities of the appropriate mix of those three workforces; and enhance the department’s results-oriented performance measures by revising existing measures or developing additional measures that will more clearly align with DOD’s efforts to monitor progress in meeting the strategic workforce-planning requirements in section 115b of Title 10 of the United States Code. DOD either concurred or partially concurred with the recommendations in our September 2012 report, stating that, among other things, the department was deliberate in applying lessons learned from previous workforce plans and identifying specific challenges and the actions being taken to address those challenges to meet statutory planning requirements by 2015. In our September 2012 report on the department’s Civilian Senior Leader strategic workforce plan, we recommended that DOD conduct assessments of the skills, competencies, and gaps within all five career Civilian Senior Leader workforces and report them in DOD’s future strategic workforce plans.and stated that the department fell short of conducting assessments of skills, competencies, and gaps within three of the five Civilian Senior Leader workforces as a result of their technical roles in the DOD leadership hierarchy, and that, as roles are refined, this work will be DOD concurred with our recommendation reflected in future plans as appropriate. The status of these and other prior recommendations may be found in appendix III. Our assessment of DOD’s Fiscal Years 2013-2018 Strategic Workforce Plan found that DOD’s plan addresses 8 and partially addresses 19 of the 32 statutory requirements. The plan does not address 5 of the 32 statutory requirements. As a result, DOD’s plan does not provide decision makers with comprehensive information on DOD’s workforce. The 2013- 2018 plan represents an improvement since 2008 when we found that DOD’s 2006-2010 Civilian Human Capital Strategic Workforce Plan did However, since not meet six of eight statutory reporting requirements.2008, Congress has expanded the number and scope of statutory requirements for DOD to include, among other things, details about its civilian senior-leader and financial-management workforces. Table 1 provides the results of our analysis of the extent to which DOD’s plan for the overall, civilian senior-leader, and financial-management workforces addressed the Section 115b statutory requirements. Section 115b of Title 10 of the United States Code requires DOD to develop a strategic workforce plan to shape and improve the civilian employee workforce of the department, to include specific elements such as an assessment of the current critical skills and competencies of the civilian workforce; any gaps in the existing or projected workforce; and the appropriate mix of civilian, military, and contractor capabilities. DOD also was required to identify the specific funding needed to achieve recruiting and retention goals, and the funding needed to implement strategies for developing, training, deploying, compensating, and motivating the civilian employee workforce of the department. In addition to addressing the overall civilian workforce, the legislation also requires the department to include separate chapters to address the shaping and improvement of specific workforces, including: (1) the Civilian Senior Leader workforce and (2) the Financial Management workforce. We summarize the results of our assessment of DOD’s overall civilian, Civilian Senior Leader, and Financial Management workforce plans below. In addition, we provide detailed information in appendix IV on the extent to which the 2013-2018 Strategic Workforce Plan addressed the statutory requirements. With regard to the overall civilian workforce, we found that DOD’s Fiscal Year 2013-2018 Strategic Workforce Plan addresses three of the statutory requirements, partially addresses six requirements, and does not address one requirement. For example, DOD’s plan addressed the requirement to provide an assessment, using results-oriented performance measures, of the progress the department has made in implementing the plan in the prior year. Specifically, DOD’s plan identified six performance measures the department is using to assess progress.