Abstract
California’s executive agencies continue to experience a growing number of older employees. The threat of these employees retiring and agencies experiencing the loss of their most trained and experienced staff presents a high risk for departments to implement essential services to Californians. In addition, California’s non-working population (under 18 and over 65) is steadily increasing, which may demand more services from California state government. This thesis explores to what extent California state agencies are adequately planning for the possibility of a major exit of baby boomers from the state workforce. The goal is to identify the extent and quality of workforce planning in California state agencies. Additionally, I aim to identify factors that both encourage and discourage agencies from engaging in such planning. I explored workforce planning in California departments using two methods. First, I acquired a sample of five publically available department workforce plans. The five workforce plans served as my sample to assess the quality of workforce planning by California departments. My analysis of the five workforce plans was guided by a rubric I developed based on the existing literature on workforce planning. Secondly, I interviewed representatives spanning seven departments to gain a greater understanding of what encouraged or discouraged those departments to invest resources in workforce planning. Those departments engaged in workforce planning demonstrated a number of positive features such as executive support, alignment with strategic planning, and data collection. In addition, California departments revealed challenges with workforce planning such as balancing competing priorities and not having adequate expertise in workforce planning. However, this study also discovered a majority of California departments are not developing workforce plans; this is an opportunity for improvement. I identified a number of policy recommendations aimed at increasing the number of agencies completing workforce plans and improving the quality of workforce planning for all departments.