‘Expensive’ older feds provide valuable mentoring resource

One of the recent posters to this blog, “Civil Servant,” makes a good point about the hard-to-measure value to new feds of those “expensive legacy employees”—long-time feds who really know the ropes.

C.S. notes in our “value of longevity” discussion that “all the degrees in the world don’t make up for field knowledge and experience”—and that thanks to the help of an older mentor, C.S. saved many man-hours of wading through red tape to get up to speed in a new job.

New feds—like employees in the private sector—benefit from mentoring provided by the seasoned employees that came before them. But most long-time federal employees—with longer average tenures—can offer new feds mentoring insights based on a length of service seldom seen in the private sector.