As part of its 2008 Global Human Capital Study, IBM polled senior HR executives in more than 400 private sector companies in 40 countries. Federal human capital professionals might find certain of the study’s outcomes interesting.

Take the executives’ responses to the question “What do you see as the primary workforce-related issues facing (your) organization?” Here are the most frequently cited issues, listed in order:

• Inability to rapidly develop skills to address current/future business needs.
• Lack of leadership capability.
• Employee skills not aligned with current organizational priorities.
• Inability to collaborate/share knowledge across the organization.
• Inability to attract qualified candidates.
• Inability to build an engaged/motivated workforce.
• Inability to retain key employees.

A brief exercise. Let me propose an instructive little pen-and-paper exercise here. Without looking at the bullet points above, make your own list of the most important workforce priorities for government human capital managers. And then rate your agency or department on how well it addresses the priorities on your list.

Now reread the list from the IBM study: strategic skills development, leadership, strategic business alignment, collaboration and knowledge management, recruiting, employee engagement, retention. I’ll bet that most of these issues — with the possible exception of knowledge management — appear in your priorities list too. What’s more, if you were to write a functional description of the human capital mission in any government agency, which of these priorities could you possibly leave out?

The point in all this? Your agency’s most vexing workforce issues are just as insistent for your private sector counterparts, and they’re essentially the same around the globe. The positive thinkers among you might find this encouraging. For one thing, there’s certainly a much deeper pool of best practice models to emulate, since HR pros worldwide are grappling every day with these challenges. On the other hand, how comforting is it to realize that virtually everyone in the profession of human capital management is in the same pickle?

Speaking generally, the federal government has significantly improved its track record for hiring and retaining minorities over the last few decades. Even so, there are two minority classes that have lagged far behind: Hispanics and the disabled . Last summer our team released a white paper on recruiting and retaining the latter group; you can find it on TMPgovernment.com.

The low proportion of Hispanics in the government’s workforce is less widely known but equally troubling. In spite of being the nation’s fastest growing minority population, and in spite of comprising 12.7% of the U.S. civilian workforce, Hispanics make up only 7.8% of all federal employees. What’s more, Hispanic men and women represent only a scant 3.6% of individuals at federal senior pay levels—a proportion that drops to 2.5% when you take political appointees out of the calculation.

One more note in what could be a much longer litany of discouraging statistics: research by the Partnership for Public Service reveals that Hispanics attending college are more interested in working for the federal government than any other student segment they surveyed.

So how do we account for the government’s less-than-perfect track record on this metric? Our team at TMP Government is studying this issue in detail right now, and we will issue a white paper on the topic in just a few weeks. We won’t be delving as deeply into the why of this sad circumstance as into practical solutions for correcting the imbalance.

If you have been following my commentary in this blog, you may guess that our prescription for improvement will include niche branding, internships, mentoring, Web 2.0 approaches, workforce planning, career modeling, and a raft of other proven as well as emerging engagement techniques.

In the meantime, if you want to weigh in on this topic, suggest solutions, or point out Best Practice exemplars in government and out, don’t hesitate to contact me.