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Recent trends in the defense acquisition workforce

• DoD has been successful in growing the size of the acquisition workforce over the past decade, with gains concentrated in the civilian acquisition workforce.
• An infusion of new hires from outside DoD coupled with the ongoing retirement of baby boomers has led the distribution of the civilian acquisition workforce to skew younger than it was one decade ago, and workers are, on average, better educated.
• Attrition rates remain lower in the civilian acquisition workforce than in the DoD-wide civilian workforce.
• The size of the military acquisition workforce has held fairly steady over the past several years, though it experiences more turnover than the civilian acquisition workforce.
• Military acquisition workforce members are more likely than their civilian counterparts to serve in program management roles.

Improvements to the study approach

• RAND now receives key data files from the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) on a quarterly rather than annual basis, enabling closer-to-real-time updates on gains and losses to the acquisition workforce and subsets of it.
• RAND researchers have begun to analyze the flow of workers into and out of the military acquisition workforce in addition to the civilian acquisition workforce.
• Researchers have refined their projection model and the process by which they merge and manage DMDC data.
• Researchers have developed a methodology to identify cohorts of new entrants to the civilian acquisition workforce in a given fiscal year and analyze characteristics of recent cohorts.