It looks like Social Security may be soon looking into “creative” ways to solve staffing shortages and increased workloads and the “creative” way is to focus on military veterans and offer them non-paid work experience.
You can read more about it on the Fronline blog from the National Council of Social Security Management Associations. It looks as if the NCSSMA is focusing on the Veterans Non-Paid Work Experience (NPWE) Program as a way to bring veterans into the Social Security workforce. It is great for Social Security to consider providing hands-on work experience for veterans, but is Social Security doing this for veterans or because it needs additional workers to handle increased workloads and doesn’t have any money to pay for an increase in the number of employees?
The problem is that working for Social Security is a pretty specific set of skills that are developed, there is only one Social Security Administration so there has to be a question of how skills learned at Social Security would translate into a different work environment? The other thought is that these veterans who learn the inner workings of Social Security during what basically consists of an internship would be prime candidates for full employment opportunities at Social Security, but there really are very few of these opportunities to speak of and maybe even less as we progress into the future. Social Security is already massively understaffed and doesn’t seem to have any plans of solving this issue with actual paid employees, so why would this change? Added to this is a current proposal where the Republican Party wants to slash Social Security’s budget even more. This would end up cutting hours where Social Security would have its doors open due to forced furloughs, so the idea that there could be a potential for these veterans to gain full employment at Social Security is pretty unrealistic.
