The Office of Personnel Management estimates that 40 percent of the federal workforce will retire over the next 10 years, but the share of contracting officer reps retiring — those who oversee the technical aspects of contracts — could be even higher, the Merit Systems Protection Board has said in an article calling on agencies to retain CORs and their technical expertise as government contracts grow larger, longer and more complicated.
Their desire to remain in their current jobs could be affected by the amount of contracting work they do in relation to their salary, MSPB said.
The annual amount spent on contracts grew by 87 percent between 1997 and 2004, and CORs oversee billions in a vast array of contracts, something they consider to be important to their job success and satisfaction, according to an MSPB survey related to an earlier report about managing CORs to improve contract outcomes.
For example, just one-third of respondents agreed they would want to say in their current jobs if contracting work increased but their grade and pay remained the same, but 71 percent said they would remain in their jobs if their contracting activities and their grade and pay increased.
Most CORs reported spending more than 25 percent of their work time on contracting duties, while 42 percent pent over half of their time — and nearly 90 percent rated contracting work as important to their overall job success, while 64 percent said contracting work increased their job satisfaction.
