A new article from The Nash & Cibinic Report, June 2025, about the futility of FAR reform has been posted to the Bulletin Board:

https://www.wifcon.com/discussion/uploads/pages_media/NCR_39_6_31wbox.pdf?_cb=1748886086

Excellent article Matthew.

I’ll add my personal perspective. I wholeheartedly agree about proper training and especially for interns/new entrants to the field. Shape them early as well with guidance and assistance.

There is a large portion, likely the majority, of career employees that will work out too. Their knowledge and experience will add benefits as well in applying new processes and procedures. But there are some naysayers that can drag the changes down. If they aren’t receptive, let them go because their influence can stymie progress.

"After “the basics,” the recurring standard for workforce development is to spend merely 80 hours on continuous learning

over a two-year period that consists of 4,160 work hours—at that rate, people spend more time at work going to the bathroom than studying their profession."

🤣

16 hours ago, Don Mansfield said:

"After “the basics,” the recurring standard for workforce development is to spend merely 80 hours on continuous learning

over a two-year period that consists of 4,160 work hours—at that rate, people spend more time at work going to the bathroom than studying their profession."

🤣

We are fortunate enough to have free and easily accessible CLP-based courses on various platforms to meet the new 100 CLP milestone. That being said, I have spent many hours filling out forms and obtaining various management approvals just to obtain permission to attend an external 8-CLP course.

A great article that I hope gains traction.

My random thoughts when reading.....

FAA, along with the Bonneville Power Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority mimic to a large extent the FAR. Why? Sound premise or not but statute and executive order seeps into them all.

"Acquisition workforce" seems to have a narrow definition for the purpose of the article. By example "CO's and specialists". I have long felt that the people part extends to others most especially the contracting officer representative (COR). My view is based on the view that with the declining 1102 workforce more dependence is placed on the COR in getting stuff done from cradle to grace. Yes, cradle to grave as the COR is the immediate face to programs and management during project planning and consideration and then becomes the immediate face to the same internal folks and the contractor during contract performance. A COR is not necessarily the lynch pin to making it all work better but I would suggest that when discussing "acquisition workforce" COR education and development should not be overlooked.

16 hours ago, Don Mansfield said:

"After “the basics,”

And in addition to @Motorcity rcity 's comment consider that CLP can in fact be many things in fact by rough count 10 options beyond the classroom stuff. Those that control the purse strings not only demand that extra management approval that Motorcity speaks of and even attempting to get credit for some OJT or attending a seminar is a cumbersome effort that usually has to go all the way to the top. Those that have no taste for fighting for their own advocacy just resign themselves to plodding through the classes as it is the easy route.

1 hour ago, C Culham said:

FAA, along with the Bonneville Power Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority mimic to a large extent the FAR. Why? Sound premise or not but statute and executive order seeps into them all.

FAA had the authority to start with a clean slate. But the workforce was used to following the FAR. Over time the new FAA system evolved from a fairly streamlined process to what it is today largely because of workforce trial and error. Employees just weren’t comfortable and processes reverted to what everyone was familar with.

Agree. I think I can summarize this article as: people > procedure.

Acquisitions are like baking cakes. How to do you bake consistently better cakes? Better recipes and better chefs. You need both. The FAR is the cookbook of recipes. The best cookbook won't matter if the chef isn't good at her job. Chefs, the acquisition workforce, professionals in general get better at their job through - among other things - professional development. The acquisition workforce lacks high-quality professional development right now. To actually improve acquisition outcomes, professional development must also improve. This is what the FAR reform initiative is missing, and why it won't succeed.

"we need to be honest about what works and what doesn’t,"

Professional development has been extensively studied, and we do know what works and what doesn't.

• Works: Experiential and Applied Learning (apprenticeships, rotations, apprenticeships, mentors). Case-Based and Problem-Based Learning.

• Doesn't Work: Passive (videos, on-demand, click-through), Individual courses (most people, but not all, learn much more interacting in groups), Info Dumps, Micro-Learning

Not surprisingly, the Good stuff takes more resources (time, effort and money), while the Bad stuff takes less resources (its relatively quick, easy and cheap). A one-year rotational apprenticeship for new employees - that is expensive. Your GS-12's sex-month detail - expensive. But not everything that works is necessarily expensive. An executive who makes her workforce's development a priority can do a lot without much additional resources. GS-9's taking 30-minutes a week going over their problems with an outside (not a direct report) GS-13/14. After-action reviews (my personal favorite method). A classic example: My first boss made me go through every single clause in 52.212-5 and explain to her why every one of those clauses did or did not apply to the instant contract, over and over again. yes, it took a lot of my time (not particularly valuable as a GS-9), but very little of hers.

3 hours ago, General.Zhukov said:

professional development must also improve

Agree. But we need to explore the concept of "professional development".

You'll notice that Lt. Col. Fleharty made a distinction between education and training. The distinction is important. I would say that education is the process of gaining knowledge and training is the process of learning how to apply knowledge in practice.

Education without training is suboptimal. Training without education is useless, even dangerous.

Education is something apprentices (interns, trainees) can do for themselves to a great extent, mainly through reading, helpfully with the guidance of a sponsor. I say that an apprentice seeking mastery must read, off duty, 200 - 300 pages of quality material each week. That's not an especially heavy load. You must read to learn key concepts and principles before you start learning government rules.

Consider the concept of contract. There is a legal definition and there are practical descriptions and explanations. The legal definition is important, but you won't learn a lot about the practical realities of contracts by reading the Restatement, Second, of Contracts.

But you can explore deeply into the concept of contracts by reading "The Many Futures of Contracts," a famous, important, and highly influential 50-page essay by Ian R. Macneil. It was published in the Southern California Law Review in 1974. Look for it online or see if you can get it at a local law library. While you're at it, also look for "A Primer of Contract Planning," also by Macneil, also published in the Southern California Law Review, in 1975. Those two essays alone would put an apprentice far ahead of their peers in terms of a deeper understanding of the nature and challenges of contracting. But they are not easy reads.

You won't be assigned those readings by your government DAU or FAI instructors, because most of them don't know about them. Again, the legal definition is important, but it won't teach you much about the kinds of things that a CO needs to know. It won't help you design, plan, create, and sustain effective contracts.

And those two essays are less than half of the pages that I think an apprentice must read each week. But I'm talking to the real prospective pros out there. The ones who seek mastery.

Apprentices will either read those essays or they won't. But if anyone were a contracting apprentice under my supervision they'd either read them, master them, and asl for more, and thus become ready to set out on the road to advancement, or they'd be available for reassignment.

I just attended a U.S. Space Force retirement ceremony for a woman who had started out 40 years ago as a GS-02 clerk typist, went to college, went on to became an Air Force Copper Cap trainee, and ended up as a member of the Senior Executive Service and the Executive Director of the U.S. Space Systems Command, with generals and staff in attendance, a wall full of awards for excellence (maybe two walls), and a large crowd of military and civilian personnel there to say goodbye to a respected and beloved boss. I flew down to attend by invitation with other former (now ancient) space cowboys.

Now, THAT is a career.

20 hours ago, Vern Edwards said:

Education without training is suboptimal. Training without education is useless, even dangerous.

How do you think the advancement and implementation of artificial intelligence into the procurement arena will affect training and education? I fear that many folks will develop a sort of "why read when the machine reads it for you" type of mentality.

@Matthew Fleharty

What is your opinion of DoD Instruction 5000.66, DEFENSE ACQUISITION WORKFORCE EDUCATION, TRAINING, EXPERIENCE, AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM?

Do you think the instruction is to blame at all for the state of the DoD contracting workforce? Or are the problems all in the execution?

11 hours ago, Motorcity said:

How do you think the advancement and implementation of artificial intelligence into the procurement arena will affect training and education?

I haven't thought much about it. I've been waiting to see what agencies actually do with AI.

I do worry that AI will lead many humans to do less thinking than they do now. Too bad if it does, because thinking is a pleasure.

On 6/4/2025 at 7:48 PM, Don Mansfield said:

@Matthew Fleharty

What is your opinion of DoD Instruction 5000.66, DEFENSE ACQUISITION WORKFORCE EDUCATION, TRAINING, EXPERIENCE, AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM?

Do you think the instruction is to blame at all for the state of the DoD contracting workforce? Or are the problems all in the execution?

Both

To note a couple items that stood out from the DoDI, Section 5 establishes the "low expectations" I criticized in my piece and Section 3 makes the President of DAU as the Chief Learning Officer... in my 16 years I haven't seen any real leadership from that role, if anything the standards and courses have eroded more and more...whose responsibility is it to say "this is not or cannot produce the acquisition workforce we need to generate the acquisition outcomes we need" if not a Chief Learning Officer?

Execution is a huge problem too. It's apparent from some of the pockets of excellence that people can still excel in this profession and pursue mastery (as Vern likes to say), but we definitely make that pursuit way more difficult than it ought to be.

For one, we don't leverage peoples' most formative moments when they enter contracting to properly educate and inspire them. I mention this in the piece so I won't further belabor the point here.

I listened to the two podcast episodes you recorded (thank you for those btw) and I think in both comments were made that contracting people don't read. I think that's fairly accurate, BUT we ought to consider why they don't read: one of my hypotheses is because the "professional" products the acquisition system currently provides them are mostly garbage. I remember in high school when I went through a stretch in my English class of reading a few assigned books I did not enjoy - it made me not want to read for a bit. That's our contracting people's daily existence - suffering through reading bad policies, Powerpoints, and guides that they don't benefit from so at some point many of them just give up (i.e. people won't go back to try and drink from a well that's dry).

On 6/3/2025 at 2:45 PM, Vern Edwards said:

Agree. But we need to explore the concept of "professional development".

You'll notice that Lt. Col. Fleharty made a distinction between education and training. The distinction is important. I would say that education is the process of gaining knowledge and training is the process of learning how to apply knowledge in practice.

Education without training is suboptimal. Training without education is useless, even dangerous.

(Emphasis added above) Thanks for highlighting this distinction Vern - the takeaway is spot on.

If readers want to know why training without education is dangerous, just look at our source selection process - all training, zero education. The result is we often end up with copy/paste solicitations without thoughtful evaluation factors or methodologies that cause source selections to take way too long evaluating "essays" that are not important to predicting which offeror and their proposal might be the best value.

2 hours ago, Matthew Fleharty said:

If readers want to know why training without education is dangerous, just look at our source selection process - all training, zero education. The result is we often end up with copy/paste solicitations without thoughtful evaluation factors or methodologies that cause source selections to take way too long evaluating "essays" that are not important to predicting which offeror and their proposal might be the best value.

That’s the chief reason from my perspective. I’ll the risk aversion setting people work in contributes. Trying something new and different is a challenge many don’t want to take on. Copying/pasting from prior examples is easier to both do as well as obtaining review boards and legal approval.

Then there is the issue of program office managers afraid of not having control. They are used to seeing things like technical approach, management plans, resumes of proposed staff, spending plans, and so on. Those are issue they want to see in proposals and evaluate. They like copy/paste.

I think all this talk of "where are the good CO's, why are the bad CO's being bad CO's," misses the reason:

All of your good CO's either (increasingly,) leave or promote.

1102 career field has not found a way to reward talent except for the axiom that the reward for good work is undoubtedly more work.

CO's are incentivized to become supervisors specifically so that frankly, they can stop CO'ing and "take care of people and impart wisdom," of which neither typically occurr.

Additionally -- it turns out -- people who make really great CO's don't always make great supervisors. Makes sense, because they are different job jars.

But that is our system! Take our best and brightest -- turn them into Supevisors!

Here, GS-13 is the CO grade. Funnily enough, it is the same grade as the first line and in some cases even second line supervisor.

So for additional responsibility, losing union status in uncertain times, and maybe what, 100$./paycheck bump -- you can PROMOTE to be a supervisor.

BUT -- that is the only way you're getting to GS-14 unless you attend all of the holiday functions, volunteer to save stranded children from land mines in your spare time, have family members actively in HR/on base to use good ol' nepotism -- and/or enjoy schmoozing and (barf,) playing golf with staff.

USAF/AFLCMC over the past couple of years decided to "fix," this by offering GS-14 equivalent CO positions, with the caveat that they will have an unbearable workload, frequent long-term travel, and generally a terrible work/life balance.

I have received four well-timed QSI's, and as a Contracting Officer, the only legitimate career progression is to become a supervisor.

OR, I can earn maybe 5-6K more with the added privilege of an expectation of an obscene workload, ultra-high-visibility, and ever-increasing add-ons.

OR, I can just be a regular Contracting Officer with a normal workload, that while at times stressful due to skill I can largely whimsically breeze through.

Your bright people aren't going to sacrifice their health and time for peanuts.

The system is broken.

@Self Employed I can definitely relate. I started as an Army civilian intern. I was very fortunate to have excellent training and some amazing experiences in my first two year duty station. Then as a GS-9, I worked in R&D with really knowledgable and experienced senior contract specialists. I kept progressing and moving through agencies every year gaining a wide range of experiences in just about everything the government buys.

Then I sought further advancement as a supervisor. The fun slowed at that point starting with multiple week supervisory training. That was followed by numerous other non-contracting training and lots of times in meetings. My daily time spent on contracting dropped by at least 25%. That was followed by another higher supervisory graded job where my contracting time went to 50%. My last job which when I moved up again involved 1/4 at best of my time. I was so involved in other matters over the following 15 years, my contracting knowledge got rusty to the point I honestly was functioning at a fraction of my former 1102 self.

12 hours ago, formerfed said:

@Self Employed I can definitely relate. I started as an Army civilian intern. I was very fortunate to have excellent training and some amazing experiences in my first two year duty station. Then as a GS-9, I worked in R&D with really knowledgable and experienced senior contract specialists. I kept progressing and moving through agencies every year gaining a wide range of experiences in just about everything the government buys.

Then I sought further advancement as a supervisor. The fun slowed at that point starting with multiple week supervisory training. That was followed by numerous other non-contracting training and lots of times in meetings. My daily time spent on contracting dropped by at least 25%. That was followed by another higher supervisory graded job where my contracting time went to 50%. My last job which when I moved up again involved 1/4 at best of my time. I was so involved in other matters over the following 15 years, my contracting knowledge got rusty to the point I honestly was functioning at a fraction of my former 1102 self.

It really does seem like that. Two levels above me has privately remarked that he honestly isn't really sure what the point of his position is. ~140K in salary that is in the line of fire of the most recent "if not supervising three consolidate," shenanigans afoot.

We'll see where we all land when the dust settles.

14 hours ago, Self Employed said:

It really does seem like that. Two levels above me has privately remarked that he honestly isn't really sure what the point of his position is. ~140K in salary that is in the line of fire of the most recent "if not supervising three consolidate," shenanigans afoot.

My situation was a little different different. I had many non-contracting subject activities to deal with - implementing automated systems, heading up agency quality council, strategic planning where contract support was involved, budgeting, head of agency CFC, fire marshal representative for complex of multiple federal and commercial organizations, etc. I always say when people are looking for promotions, be careful what you wish for.