On December 17, 2010, President Obama issued executive order 13562 which created the Pathways Program. It was done to help the federal government better compete with the private sector for employees who lack significant and relevant prior work experience. In the September/October issue of the Washington Monthly, Rachel Cohen has a piece on How to Find a Job with Uncle Sam that details how the Pathways programs work in practice.
The Internship Program, designed for current students, provides paid work opportunities in federal agencies for a limited period of time. Interns can work either on a part-time or full-time basis.
Next there is the Recent Graduates Program, which is open to individuals who have completed, within the previous two years, an associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, professional, doctorate, vocational, or technical degree or certificate from a qualifying educational institution. These recent graduates can work in federal agencies while also taking advantage of substantial career training and mentorship opportunities.
Lastly, the Presidential Management Fellows Program is a leadership and career-development program for those with newly minted graduate degrees.
In all three divisions of the Pathways Programs, if you successfully complete the term of service you can receive what is known as “noncompetitive eligibility” when applying for federal jobs. This means that your employer can convert you straight from a Pathways participant into a permanent employee or you can apply for other federal positions without having to go through the standard, and highly competitive, USAJOBS application process.
The advantages of these programs are that they give you a better chance of landing a job within the Federal Government and that they give you an opportunity to learn the culture of our various bureaucracies in advance so that you can determine if they are a good fit for you. Prior to the issuance of this executive order, the Federal Government heavily favored applicants with significant prior work experience, which made it difficult for college students and recent graduates to get employment.
ASDF.
Wish I’d known about this when I was eligible in 2010/11. God dammit. Dammit.
that’s great for people who aren’t me. I’m not eligible.
It’s probably not all about you.
i know.
but it’s hard to get by on $25K a year and the best you can find (when you have a nearly ten year track record of success) is a PT job. When you’re 43.
Not all of us get to work at the Atlantic.
adding, you DO realize how fucking rude that is to say to someone who makes his living raising money in support of programs for poor people, right?
of course you do.
No, I don’t realize how rude it is, I guess, because I thought the rude thing is what I was responding to.
See, taking my post and making it all about you isn’t just rude to me, but it’s totally dismissive of the whole reason I wrote the post.
And I don’t work for The Atlantic, and I don’t make even as much money as you working where I do work.
Thanks for sharing. Sent link to my gf. However, she told me she already knew about it and has applied to many of them already. No luck yet.
If anyone in the public health field knows of anything — especially if it’s with the CDC — let me know.
Thanks, might be useful for my daughter next summer.
A classmate of mine used the Recent Graduates Program to get a job at the NIH. It seems to work pretty well for her.
Whatever happened to registering for the Civil service Exam and taking it to get on a register?
Oh, right, managers couldn’t pick and choose under the old system. They had to take people without connections, and without regard to race, sex, and political affiliation.
That program could help a lot more people if it didn’t arbitrarily limit applicants to “recent graduates”.
The continued face-fucking of the long-term unemployed continues in this country. Our version of Israel’s slow genocide of Palestinians.
Hooray for nepotism and shortsightedness!
What a fucking stupid and obnoxious thing to say.
Read the goddamned executive order.
It is intended to address the fact that the federal government had a system that heavily-favored people with work experience (including the long-term unemployed) over people with little applicable work experience.
You go to college and get a degree that ought to qualify you for an entry level job at the Commerce Department or the Justice Department or the State Department of the Department of Education, and you get shut out because you’ve been in college working at Arby’s instead of working in your new area of expertise.
And your response to this is to complain that people who had jobs but lost them aren’t getting a hand up with paid internships designed for entry level work.
That doesn’t even make an elementary amount of sense. If you have work experience relevant to a field of government, then fucking apply for the job.
Wow. Pull those big-boy pants back up and calm down just a bit.
All I said was that this program literally only helps those who have recently graduated.
Newsflash for you older folks with GenerationXPrivilegeTM : many people who have hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt with no experience in the field they studied for are ALSO long-term unemployed.
Try asking someone who graduated from law school in 2008 how their job hunt went, and what they’re doing now since no legal experience + time = never going to work in the legal field. Hell, expand that to 2009, 2010, 2011, etc.
Hence, my very first line, which you might want to take your time re-reading.
Why discriminate against graduates who graduated 3, 4, 5 years ago, while favoring those who recently graduated? Why does someone who is unemployed because they graduated in 2008-2009 less worthy of a government internship/position than someone who just graduated AND might even be working in their field of interest?
Go ahead and ignore the rest since I’m not an Israeli apologist and I hate oligarchy.
It only helps people who have recently gotten a degree because the whole problem is that people who have recently gotten a degree were not getting any government jobs because they lacked relevant work experience.
Why is this hard to understand?
If you have relevant work experience, you were favored in the system even if you were currently unemployed. This change merely evens the playing field.
There is nothing hard to understand.
My criticism of the program is that it doesn’t go far enough. There are hundreds of thousands of “non-recent’ graduates who have zero experience in their field and are even more likely to not be able to get a government job.
I’m allowed to lob criticism at a program for not going far enough, right? I mean, I’m not calling for Obama’s impeachment over it. Just saying that there’s a whole cohort of people who graduated from college, never got a job in their field, and are ineligible for government jobs because of lack of experience, and this program does not address that problem at all.