“I was young at work, and I looked around my office and there weren’t a lot of people that looked like me,” he said. “I was 24 at the time and I think the closest person to my age was in their early 40s. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re kind of looking for peers.”

New to government, he often lacked the background knowledge he needed to inform a specific project he was working on, and turned to Google to find a few of the answers.

It’s a story that might sound familiar to many young federal employees.

Ressler founded both Young Government Leaders and Gov Loop with a similar idea in mind: he wanted to create a community of government employees who could learn from each other and share knowledge and experiences with their peers.

“There’s just some natural concerns you have at 24, whether you were 24 in 2015 or 24 in 1992,” Ressler said. “The concerns of young, rising leaders are stuff any new entrant to work has when they’re trying to figure out work — how do I find great work, how do I have an impact, how do I understand the bureaucracy, how do I navigate through the bureaucracy?”

Young Government Leaders, which Ressler first started as a happy hour group for younger federal employees, now has more than 9,000 members and 12 chapters across the United States. Gov Loop is an online social network for more than 200,000 employees in local, state and federal agencies.

Both organizations are hosting the Next Generation of Government Training Summit July 21-22.

For Ressler, it’s all about harnessing the excitement up and coming government leaders have toward their agencies’ missions — and creating opportunities for them to connect with their peers.

“It’s important for any affinity group to have time to connect and get inspired from each other,” he said. “There’s a real risk among these rising government leaders that they’re going to come in and leave and disenfranchise. If we can connect folks in government that are rising in their career to other folks like them and get them inspired and excited to stay in public service, that’s a game changer.”

— Nicole Ogrysko

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Studio Y: Recent grads recruit young people to federal service

Studio Y: Understanding your next-generation workforce

Agencies are always looking for young people to recruit as interns or possible future employees.

One strategy that seems to make sense is using young employees or recent interns to visit college campuses to talk up the advantages of a career in federal service.

That’s the idea behind the Partnership for Public Service’s Federal Student Ambassadors program.

“The Federal Student Ambassadors program is a way to recruit young individuals and individuals at colleges to federal service,” said Emily McConnell, associate manager of the Partnership’s education and outreach team. “We’ll work with different agencies, work with their current, high-performing interns, kind of train them on how to best talk about federal programs as well as different opportunities at campuses and then deploy them back on to their campuses, where they’re able to be first hand ambassadors representatives, 24-7, about that different agency, their opportunities and the great work that they got to do as a intern there.”

One thing the Partnership has learned in talking to students at the various campuses its representatives visit is that there is a definite interest among students to join the federal service.

“They’re not sure really how to get their foot in the door,” McConnell said. “How to best tweak their application, how to make sure they know about every opportunity and all the different agencies that could be applying for.”

That’s where FSA comes in. The ambassadors act as, well, ambassadors to the federal service, talking to their peers about their own experiences interning or working for an agency.

FSA ambassador Michelle Marcarelli is a consumer safety officer in the Office of Scientific Investigations (OSI), Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While she was still a student at the University of Maryland, she began her career as an intern at FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) in the Office of Compliance (OC) and as an office automation clerk.

Interning proved to be such a positive experience that when she heard about FSA, she jumped at the chance to go back to school to talk to her peers about working in the federal government.

“I understand the stresses and uncertainty that comes with being a student and looking at federal positions,” Marcarelli said. “I think it can be difficult to kind of understand what you need to do in order to create your application and look at the jobs that may be applicable to you and get a better idea about the benefits of FDA and actually just the federal government in general.”

— Michael O’Connell

In the latest installment of the Studio Y podcast, producers Michael O’Connell and Nicole Ogrysko talk to Emily McConnell of the Partnership for Public Service and Michelle Marcarelli of the Food and Drug Administration about the Federal Student Ambassadors program and the efforts to recruit young people into a career in the federal government. They also talk about their own experiences transitioning from being college interns to working professionals. Subscribe to Studo Y or download episodes on iTunes or on AudioBoom.

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Studio Y: Understanding your next-generation workforce

With millennials making up just 7 percent of the federal workforce in 2013 — an eight-year low — federal managers acknowledge that in order to make their agencies representative of the American public, they need to hire quite a few more twenty and thirty- somethings.Understanding “Generation Y,” a generation that is often characterized as lazy, entitled and far too dependent on technology, is a challenge for government leaders, too.

Sean Herron, 25, and Annalee Flower Horne, 29, both started working for GSA’s 18-F innovation lab about six months ago. Their outlook on government and the work they do is anything but lazy or entitled.

“I like being of service,” said Flower Horne, an innovation specialist at 18F. “I like that I’m writing open-source tools that are helping the American people. And I probably could go to the private sector, but I would rather do work that matters than have stock-options.”

Flower-Horne spent two years working for Congress before she joined an open government startup and learned to code.

Herron, a product lead and developer at 18F, taught himself to code as a way to make extra money during college to pay off his student loans. He started off as an intern for NASA when he was 19 and worked on open data projects for the Food and Drug Administration as a Presidential Innovation Fellow before coming to 18-F. Now at 25, he said it was the moment when he took an oath office at 18-F, that he realized he had the opportunity to do important work for a large group of people.”We’re driven by more than just having a steady career that pays the bills,” he said. “Everyone is looking to have meaning in the work that they’re doing and really have a meaningful experience in their job.”

— Nicole Ogrysko

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