Online library invaluable in civilian hiring process

Published Feb. 4, 2010
By Daniel Elkins
Air Force Personnel Center Public Affairs Office

RANDOLPH AIR FORCE BASE, Texas -- An Air Force hiring surge in the coming year combined with the termination of the National Security Personnel System make it even more critical for supervisors to know where to go for guidance in the hiring process.

The Air Force Standard Core Personnel Document Library provides hiring managers standardized classification documents for NSPS, General Schedule and Wage Grade positions. Established in 1996, the number of published standardized core personnel documents, or SCPDs, located at the online library is 952, accounting for more than 43,000 positions, and are mandatory for Air Force-wide use.

"The library came into existence as a means to develop standardized documents to be used across the Air Force; our vision is to link civilian positions numbers on unit manning documents directly to the approved SCPD," said Col. Brian Norman, Air Force Manpower Agency commander. "This should reduce start time to fill civilian positions in the future."

Located here at the Air Force Manpower Agency, the office responsible for developing and managing the SCPD library is taking on a significant role in 2010. While it prepares for the service to add more than 9,000 jobs, the office must simultaneously tackle the daunting task of reclassifying more than 875 NSPS standard position descriptions, encompassing about 3,000 jobs, back to General Schedule.

The classification library can be found by typing in SCPD library into the search function on the Air Force Portal.

The Air Force previously issued guidance to accompany each new classification standard, created by the Office of Personnel Management, informing supervisors on how to apply the standard for the Air Force. The SCPD library replaced the outdated classification guidance method while contributing significantly to the standardization of positions, according to Christine Ayers, SCPD library manager.

"The benefit of SCPDs is that they standardize classification across the Air Force," she said. "A valuable benefit of the library is that it helps eliminate any factors that aren't associated to the true classification of a position and removes any inconsistencies."
Ms. Ayers said the library is also beneficial in standardizing skills and recruitment criteria.

That recruitment criterion has been essential over the past several months as thousands of civil service jobs have been added to the service's manpower books. They include civilian unit program coordinators, fitness assessment cell administrators and contractor-to-civilian conversions. The Air Force projects an even larger hiring surge in fiscal 2011 with an estimated 25,000 new positions by fiscal 2013.

In the process of coordinating NSPS conversions, special initiatives and new classification standards, the library staff relies heavily on its communication with career functional managers. Whether initiated internally or developed based on management requests, SCPDs entail intensive research and analysis to ensure their accuracy, Ms. Ayers said. Should a management request not require an SCPD, hiring managers should consult their career functional management team for assistance in creating their own core documents.

Of significant concern to many managers in this hiring process is the speed at which a new employee can be in place. Ms. Ayers believes that perhaps the greatest benefit of the SCPD library is that it speeds the personnel processing time by allowing managers access to documents that have already been classified.

"When a request for personnel action goes to classification authority on a standardized PD, it's going to move through much quicker," Ms. Ayers said. "The classifier has to verify that the work is performed, but the SCPD is considered to be technically correct and properly classified."

The number of classified documents in the SCPD library stands to grow considerably in the months ahead as a result of a provision in National Defense Authorization Act to repeal NSPS and transition employees to the General Schedule or a previous pay system by Jan. 1, 2012.

"It's going to have a huge impact," Ms. Ayers insists.

The SCPD library staff had been developing standardized position descriptions, or SPDs, for NSPS on a phased-in approach since 2007. The SPDs were written prescriptively so that skills across a broader range of grades could be lumped into single pay bands. Converting the approximately 875 SPDs written back to SCPDs will be quite an undertaking.

The conversion for jobs that have legacy position descriptions, those existing under a previous pay system before conversion to NSPS, will transition more smoothly. The nearly 3,000 documents newly created under NSPS will require a more exhaustive assessment.

"When you have a pay band that covers GS-9 through GS-13 without a reach back GS position description, you can't arbitrarily assign a GS position to it when converting back," Ms. Ayers explained. "Any SPD that someone has been placed on since the inception of NSPS will now have to be carefully reviewed to determine the GS classification when it reverts back."