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Contracting Officer's Training Tools


Prezmil2020

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Good Morning,

Over the past two years my contracting office has seen a large turnover in contracting personnel. Many of the experienced Contracting Officers have retired and new recruits have taken their place. While these new associates are taking the mandatory CON courses, I would like to establish a knowledge center in our office to help them apply what they learned in class to their work. This can also be a great source for the more experienced Contracting Officers as well.

With that said, I am asking that you share with the group any books, publications, and literature regarding the FAR, SOWs, RFPs, RFQs, BPAs, IDIQs, and any other acquisition topics that you feel a new contracting professional would need to know. In other words, assume that all of the supervisors are at a meeting and a new recruit needs to know the difference between FAR 12 and FAR 13 but has nobody to ask. Rather than read the FAR and just regurgitate the clauses and parapraphs I would like them to know how to apply the FAR or DFARS, GSAM, etc. I would like to know what helped you in your careers.

To get things started, I am recommending the book, How To Write A Statement of Work, by Peter S. Cole. This book is an overview of what should go in a SOW and how it should properly be written.

Thanks,

Prezmil2020

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Good Morning,

Over the past two years my contracting office has seen a large turnover in contracting personnel. Many of the experienced Contracting Officers have retired and new recruits have taken their place. While these new associates are taking the mandatory CON courses, I would like to establish a knowledge center in our office to help them apply what they learned in class to their work. This can also be a great source for the more experienced Contracting Officers as well.

With that said, I am asking that you share with the group any books, publications, and literature regarding the FAR, SOWs, RFPs, RFQs, BPAs, IDIQs, and any other acquisition topics that you feel a new contracting professional would need to know. In other words, assume that all of the supervisors are at a meeting and a new recruit needs to know the difference between FAR 12 and FAR 13 but has nobody to ask. Rather than read the FAR and just regurgitate the clauses and parapraphs I would like them to know how to apply the FAR or DFARS, GSAM, etc. I would like to know what helped you in your careers.

To get things started, I am recommending the book, How To Write A Statement of Work, by Peter S. Cole. This book is an overview of what should go in a SOW and how it should properly be written.

Thanks,

Prezmil2020

Buy the office at least one copy of the Nash and Cibinic (et al) series of textbooks on Government Contracting.

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A little off topic, but some agencies are using technology to help but newbies as well as seasoned staff. They do thing like capture examples of good documents, templates, best practices, training materials, etc. and provide them where everyone can access them like on sahred drive or a Share Point site. They also a "help" type Q&A capability where someone can ask a question and receive a fast response. It can be as simple as a group email address or a threaded discussion type such as this..

A few establish a virtual mentoring capability where a junior person is assigned to one or more mentors and the dialogue only shows up for the participants. Bob did something similar here a couple years ago.

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Good for you for not relying on the CON training. I completed all of mine before any of it went on-line. My courses came from a mix of contractor-provided offerings and a couple from DAU. Sadly, I would the training was mediocre, at best. Now that many of the courses are on-line, I don't even want to know how poor the quality of the training is.

If there is an NCMA chapter in your area, it may offer some good programming. Go to www.ncmahq.org to see if there is a local chapter.

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