To help conduct 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. Each of these communities includes a varying number of mission-critical occupations. For the 2010-2018 strategic workforce plan, 11 functional communities provided some information on their 22 mission-critical occupations in an appendix to the plan. Mission- critical occupations are positions key to DOD’s current and future mission requirements, as well as those that present recruiting and retention challenges. Table 1 lists the 11 functional communities along with their mission-critical occupations. DOD’s mandated strategic workforce plans are developed by the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service’s Strategic Human Capital Planning Office, which is within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. To collect data and information from the functional communities, the Strategic Human Capital Planning Office develops a reporting template that it sends to the 11 functional community managers within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The template consists of three sections that request information and data on areas such as workforce end-strength forecasts, constraints that impact the ability to meet end-strength targets, status of competency development, and strategies to fill gaps. To complete the template, the functional community managers work with their counterparts at the component level to collect the necessary information and data for the mission-critical occupations. Once the component-level functional community managers collect the necessary information and data, they send their completed templates back to the functional community integrators, who compile all the information and data for each community into one cohesive functional community document. The Strategic Human Capital Planning Office then compiles the various reports from the functional community managers and integrators and issues the report after it passes an internal review. Figure 1 identifies the key offices that develop the strategic workforce plan. Our previous work has found that, in general, DOD’s efforts to develop workforce plans have been mixed. In our February 2009 report, we recommended that DOD develop performance plans for its program offices that have responsibilities to oversee development of the strategic workforce plan. Specifically, we recommended that the performance plans include establishing implementation goals and time frames, measuring performance, and aligning activities with resources to guide its efforts to implement its strategic workforce plan. DOD partially concurred with our recommendations and noted that efforts were underway to develop performance plans. DOD assessed, to varying degrees, the existing and future critical skills and competencies for all but one of its mission-critical occupations, but the department did not assess gaps for most of them. Further, DOD’s report did not include the most up-to-date or timely information when it issued its most recent report. Section 115b of Title 10 of the United States Code requires that DOD’s strategic workforce plan include an assessment of the critical skills and competencies of the existing civilian-employee workforce and DOD, in response to that requirement, assessed to varying degrees the existing critical skills and competencies for 21 of its 22 mission-critical occupations. We have previously reported that it is essential for agencies to determine the skills and competencies that are critical to successfully achieving their missions and goals. This is especially important as changes in national security, technology, budget constraints, and other factors change the environment within which federal agencies operate. The assessments contained in DOD’s 2010-2018 plan, however, varied significantly in terms of the amount of detail provided. This variation can be attributed, in part, to the fact that some communities are able to draw on existing requirements and standards. For example, the information technology functional community used the Clinger-Cohen Competencies for the Information Technology Workforce, which provide a description of the technical competencies for various information technology occupations, to assess the critical skills and competencies within its workforce. Accordingly, the information technology functional community manager was able to provide detail and specificity when describing this community’s assessment processes and the results of those assessments. Similarly, the medical functional community was able to use existing national standards for licensure and board certification for physicians when it assessed particular critical skills and competencies. This community was able to provide specific details about its assessment processes and the results from those assessments. In contrast, while the installations and environment functional community reported on the competency models available for assessing its two mission-critical occupations, firefighters and safety-and-health managers, this community did not provide the results of any analyses using these models. DOD is also required to report on the critical skills and competencies that will be needed in its future workforces. We have previously reported that an agency needs to define the critical skills and competencies that it will require in the future to meet its strategic program goals. Doing so can help an agency align its human-capital approaches that enable and sustain the contributions of all the critical skills and competencies needed for the future. Our assessment of DOD’s 2010-2018 strategic workforce plan found that for 17 of the 22 mission-critical occupations, DOD provided some discussion of future competencies. For the remaining five mission-critical occupations, DOD reported that functional community managers were waiting for the completion of competency models for their specific mission-critical occupations before assessing future competencies. One functional community, Intelligence, did not provide an assessment of skills and competencies for either its existing or future mission-critical occupations. DOD officials told us that the intelligence community’s assessments are maintained in classified documents and could not be provided in the department’s 2010-2018 strategic workforce plan. According to the plan, the Offices of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agreed instead to capture the reporting requirements in already established human-capital employment plans that were submitted by intelligence-community elements to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Officials from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence acknowledged that they should provide input into DOD’s strategic workforce plan and stated that they would provide input into the next submission of the plan. DOD officials responsible for developing the strategic workforce plan said they followed a collaborative process and met numerous times to seek input and guidance for developing the plan. To obtain information and data from each functional community, the Strategic Human Capital Planning Office distributed a reporting template to the functional community managers that contained a series of questions related to the requirements of section 115b of Title 10 of the United States Code. For the 2010-2018 plan, from May 2009 through October 2010 the Strategic Human Capital Planning Office provided informal guidance for template development to functional community managers, integrators, and action officers. This office also provided additional training and one-on-one sessions with integrators, and tailored meetings with functional community managers to address completion. The template, however, did not define key terms such as skills and competencies. Accordingly, we found that the functional community managers interpreted the questions within the template differently and developed different understandings of key terms. For example, officials in one functional community explained to us that they viewed skills as a subset of a larger category of competencies. Officials in a separate functional community associated skills with employee capabilities and competencies with occupational descriptions. Without clear guidance for assessing skills and competencies, functional community managers are likely to continue to provide inconsistent responses that vary in detail and usefulness to decision makers. Section 115b of Title 10 of the United States Code requires DOD to include an assessment of gaps in the existing and future civilian employee workforce that should be addressed to ensure that the department has continued access to the critical skills and competencies needed to accomplish its mission. We have previously reported that once an agency identifies the critical skills and competencies that its future workforce must possess, it can develop strategies tailored to address gaps in the number, skills and competencies, and deployment of the workforce. Our analysis found, however, that functional community managers reported conducting competency gap assessments for only 8 of the 22 mission-critical occupations. These 8 occupations include nurses, pharmacists, clinical psychologists, social workers, medical officers, security specialists, police officers, and human-resources managers. Further, in cases where the functional community managers did conduct gap analyses, they did not report the results of these assessments. Officials responsible for developing the 2010-2018 plan told us that they focused on identifying critical-skill gaps based on staffing levels in the mission-critical occupations. According to these officials, competency gaps will be assessed using the Defense Competency Assessment Tool that is scheduled for initial deployment in late fiscal year 2013. In some cases, competency models are still being developed that will enable the functional communities to conduct gap assessments for their mission-critical occupations. For example, the financial-management functional community stated specifically in DOD’s plan that it did not complete a gap assessment because competency models for its mission- critical occupations remain incomplete. The financial-management community reported in the plan that, upon completion of its competency models, it will be able to fully assess gaps in knowledge and skills. DOD officials responsible for the plan told us that they anticipate these models to be completed by the end of 2012. Some functional communities, similarly, are waiting for the completion of an automated competency assessment tool in order to complete their gap assessments. The logistics functional community stated in the plan, for example, that it will use DOD’s Defense Competency Assessment Tool when it becomes available. Because this community, as of September 2010, had more than 18,000 personnel serving in the mission-critical occupation of logistics-management specialist, community officials explained that the workforce is too large to track without an automated tool. Further, some officials attributed the absence of gap analyses to other priorities that took precedence.