How unified workforce data could reshape federal mission readiness

Federal agencies are accelerating their workforce modernization efforts as hiring bottlenecks, skills shortages, and new federal talent initiatives expose the limitations of long-standing personnel models. The average federal hire takes approximately 98 days, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, creating growing concern that agencies cannot bring in or reposition critical talent quickly enough to support AI adoption, cybersecurity demands, and other high-priority missions.

Those pressures were at the center of a recent FedScoop-produced podcast conversation with Cliff Purkey, Principal Product Manager at Workday Government and former Deputy Chief Human Resources Officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Alicia Dube, Executive Vice President for Human Capital Management Transformation and Federal Workday Practice Lead at Groundswell.

Purkey argued that the government has reached an inflection point where “talent debt” rivals technical debt. “For years, modernization meant cloud road maps and AI dashboards,” he said. “But we’re trying to run 21st-century technology with a 20th-century mindset. If your hiring process takes six months and your job descriptions are five years old, that expensive AI processor you just bought is effectively a paperweight.”

With nearly 44% of the federal workforce over the age of 50, Purkey warned that agencies are losing institutional knowledge at a faster rate than they can replace it. “We can’t just hire our way out of this,” he said. “There aren’t enough data scientists on the market. We have to upskill the brilliant people we already have and start managing a portfolio of capabilities, not rigid job titles.”

Dube reinforced that workforce modernization must begin with mission outcomes, not systems. “This starts by treating workforce modernization as a mission enabler, not an HR system upgrade,” she said. In practice, this means defining success in terms of faster hiring, stronger retention, and improved readiness, and then designing workforce experiences to align with these goals.

She outlined three steps agencies are increasingly taking: focusing on employee and manager experience, standardizing processes and definitions across the enterprise, and using technology to enable agility once those foundations are in place. “It’s people first,” Dube said. “That doesn’t mean technology later. It means technology implemented to serve people and outcomes.”

Both speakers agreed that fragmented workforce data has been a significant barrier to effective management. Purkey described decades of “flying blind” across more than 100 disconnected HR systems. By moving toward unified human capital management platforms, leaders gain real-time insight into skills, readiness and retirement risk. “Visibility is the difference between reacting to the future and creating it,” Purkey said

Dube added that unified data makes the “art of the possible” tangible, enabling agencies to forecast skill gaps, target learning investments and move talent internally instead of relying solely on external hiring. “The biggest shift is moving from ‘we think we know our workforce’ to ‘we can prove it with data,’” she said.

Both emphasized that success hinges on leadership mindset and change management. “We have to stop asking, ‘What is your job?’ and start asking, ‘What can you do?’” Purkey said. Dube echoed that modernization is fundamentally about adoption. “Technology enables it,” she said, “but people make it real.”

Learn how Workday Government Cloud helps agencies operate more strategically and adapt quickly to change.

This podcast was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by Workday.