How to be an advocate at your agency

As alumni, the best way to ensure the ongoing success of the PMF Program is to help current finalists be placed. This positions talented people in critical roles, ensures their development, and helps grow our alumni network.

Follow this guide to encourage your federal agency to hire more PMFs, or access the most recent advocacy presentation.

Note: These steps assume your agency has hired PMFs before. If not, see OPM’s agency responsibilities to get started.

1) Identify How Hiring Decisions are Made

Every agency is different. You understand the value of a PMF; now you need to figure out who to sell it to. Start by identifying:

• Who authorizes a position to be created or filled?

• Who advises on how that position is filled?

• What problem are they hiring to solve?

By identifying these stakeholders, you are identifying who to make the arguments to, who can say yes, and who will benefit most from hiring PMFs.

2) Make the Right Argument for Your Agency

Next, assess your agency’s maturity level when it comes to using the PMF Program.

Novice: There are some PMFs, I think.

Intermediate: There is a PMF group and an identified program coordinator who helps hire.

Sophisticated: There is an active PMF community and an engaged who actively supports PMF hiring and development.

3) Identify the Pain Points with the PMF Program

Then, match your agency’s level of sophistication with the program with the agency or sub-agency specific challenges they have to overcome to use the program better:

• What is standing in the way of additional PMF hiring?

• What about the program does my decisionmaker need to understand the value of?

• What are the tradeoffs my agency must make?

• How can I demonstrate the ease of addressing these problems?

Now you’re ready to demonstrate that you already have the solution to your agency’s needs. The words you use are important; these aren’t problems, they’re opportunities to improve and grow.

4) Match the Role

Why are you hiring? Look for specific opportunities where PMFs will naturally excel, rather than encouraging blanket hiring. Find the pockets where your agency needs innovative solutions, builds pilot projects, engages in reverse mentoring, targets future leaders, launches new initiatives, or is standing up a new office. These are prime opportunities to onboard a PMF.

For any position, be sure to ask, is this the right job for a PMF? Not every job is a good fit. Ideally, the job will have a strong career ladder, obvious developmental opportunities, and access to decision makers or experts. We want to create an experience that’s great for agencies and for fellows.

5) Find a Champion

Find an executive to be your agency’s PMF champion. Consider a senior advisor, subject matter expert, deputy chief of staff, or even a political appointee. The Senior Executive Service is full of PMI/PMF alumni (at least 1 out of every 10).

Make them your biggest cheerleader. Be a node in their network and pass information. Connect them with your agency coordinator and encourage rotations. Find ways to support knowledge sharing.

Ask for their expertise and to share their PMF story. Encourage them to use their (“small p”) political expertise to push other managers to consider hiring PMFs.

6) Leverage Your Agency Coordinator

Your agency coordinator is the link between PMFs, your agency, and OPM. Identify your agency coordinator in the Talent Management System. Be aware that agency sub-components may have additional, possibly unofficial, coordinators that assist in this process; be sure to connect with them as well.

Get your decisionmakers and champions are connected to your coordinator(s). As an alum, ask what can you do to be a good partner. They don’t need a dozen suggestions for how to do their job better, but they would love your help.

Make clear to new connections that there are standard processes already in place to onboard PMFs and that coordinators are well-versed in them.

7) Address Concerns Head On

We’ve heard all the reasons not to hire a PMF. The important thing is to address the concerns behind those reasons and to help move the decision makers past them.

→ PMFs are notorious for leaving the office they start in. That happens sometimes. But PMFs stay where they see a path to growth and someone they want to grow to be like. (PMFs also stay in the offices that care about investing in all their employees, not just the special hire.)

At the very least, the office gets a year of solid productivity and feedback on your office culture and potential areas for growth.

Take advantage of PMFs’ ambition and aspirations to move up in the organization by creating a PD with a full performance level of GS-13.

→ PMF rotations leave the office short-staffed and require excessive paperwork. If a position is good for a PMF, it’s great for a PMF rotation. Arrange to backfill with another PMF during that time so there’s no gap.

Internal rotations are an excellent solution that reduce the lift of a rotation at a different agency and offer the change to explore opportunities and career paths within a PMF’s home agency.

→ PMFs cost an extra $7,000. This fee covers OPM’s assessment and some the required training, including the PMF Leadership Development Program. Most PMFs start at a GS-9; assuming they overperform their grade for a year, they’ve already made up the salary difference between a GS-7 and GS-9.

PMFs are low-risk, high reward employees — about as close to a sure thing as you can get in the federal hiring process. $7,000 is much cheaper than the cost of a bad hire, which experts estimate costs between 30% of the first year’s salary to $240,000.

→ PMFs require 80 hours of training annually. OPM provides the bulk of these training hours. In addition to free and existing training opportunities, think about training collectively to provide new opportunities for all your employees.

→ PMFs are entitled, ambitious, or hard to work with. PMFs are talented and they know it. But they are also easily taught, want to know more, and are eager to excel. They want to make a difference and affect positive change, and they need direction and room to work. Bringing on a PMF offers great teachable moments on teamwork and emotional intelligence as well as growth opportunities for existing managers.

8) Close the Deal

We — PMI/PMF alumni — care about this program because we have seen firsthand the value of investing in people, and we have personally benefitted from that investment. Any new hire is extra work up front, but it is also an opportunity to make an investment in a future leader and in the future of the organization.

You are the success story. And so many people at your agency have skills and experience to pass on. Take advantage of a cohort that is smart, driven, wants to serve, and wants to learn.

More Resources

A major advantage of a PMF is their teach-ability, but the current position description (PD) systems generally don’t account for that. The PMF Program Office partnered within OPM to develop PMF PD templates.

These templates enable agencies to hire fellows from a variety of backgrounds and skillsets and develop them to meet the qualification requirements of specific target positions by the end of the 2-year fellowship, instead of trying to hire finalists into specific positions that have restrictive qualifications that recent graduates are unlikely to meet.

Reach Out

Want more targeted support for advocacy at your agency? Need a specialized approach? Contact director@pmaa.us for a consultation or to build a targeted training for the alumni in your network.