We all know about the baby boomers. They are about to reach retirement age, if they haven’t already, and leave us with an inadequate number of professionals and trained personnel as we move further into the 21st century. Thus, I was interested the other day to compare two documents that came across my desk.

One was a report from the Partnership for Public Service, an organization located here in Washington, pointing out that the war for talent was hitting the federal government particularly hard as more than one-third of the full-time permanent federal work force prepares to depart in the next half decade.

The Partnership for Public Service has hooked up with IBM to reach out to some of the non-public service retiring baby boomers and induce them to come into the government for what are called “encore careers,” with the promise of interesting and challenging work. A start was being made to recruit IBM personnel and get them to consider key federal government positions. The report cited 14,000 “mission-critical jobs” at the U.S. Department of Treasury alone that will come available in only the next two years. Almost 8,000 IRS agents and tax examiners are being sought and there is a long list of others — procurement, information technology, and accounting personnel are also “most wanted.”

In addition to the Partnership for Public Service, IBM, and the AARP, an organization called Civic Ventures plans to urge other corporate leaders to participate. The president of the partnership, Dr. Max Stier, says that FedExperience Experience to Government is a triple winner, pointing out that older people get a second career with meaningful work; the government gets talent it needs; and the American people are well served. Apparently, IBM has done this sort of thing successfully in the past, with an initiative called “Transition to Teaching” which allowed IBM people to try their hand in the classroom.

I mentioned a second document: it was an article from the Washington Post, which addressed government compensation. For the first time, a significant number of federal employees at the top of the government salary scale hit a General Schedule “pay cap.” The cap is set at $149,000 so presumably most of America is not going to feel obliged to send care packages. Still, we’re talking about thousands of people who are key to the operation of the government. If they stay in government service, inflation will continue to eat their pay, and their pensions, which are related to their salaries, will be smaller than they perhaps anticipated. One has a feeling that this pay cap could influence even more people to depart than otherwise, taking their talents to the private sector.

So, the private sector is encouraging their retirees to go to work for the government at the same time that the pay policies of the government may be inducing some of the best and brightest to depart federal service and seek opportunities in the private sector. What’s wrong with this picture?