Good luck to all of those BI’s being laid off and looking for work. There is one
new opening at one of the 3 large contract companies. I recently resigned my
position. I was part of the largest class that they had ever trained in June. It consisted of BI’s and a few Reviewers. For a company that has been doing this a long time there was nothing about their training or process that was impressive or even logical. Half of the class did not have access to the programs necessary to do the job and therefore we learned everything via PowerPoint and nothing hands-on. The lack of access was just poor planning and execution.
They had assigned most of our cases before we had even arrived for training and the clock was ticking. In one breath they would say that we were not liable for our “stats” until we had been on our own for 6 months and the next day slam us for not meeting deadlines. They demanded OT for people that barely knew what they were doing. The added pressure was unnecessary and when I called them on it they backed down and admitted the truth. I just got tired of being lied to by people that had no idea how to manage people.
Their contract is about to expire and they are very concerned about the re-compete. Given what I observed, they should be concerned, but I’m sure they have enough clout with DoD to continue on no matter how poorly they perform. Investigations is only 10% of their current business.
Maybe in a few days I will but not when I have things pending with them.
I also forgot to mention that we had a few sub-contractors in that class.
I would say that right up to the last day my SL had zero confidence that we would continue to receive cases from OPM. About half of his people were so far behind that OPM would no longer send them new cases. As I said, most of them were new investigators and still learning the job. To make matters worse, we had so many new inexperienced reviewers that half the time we would receive re-opens and the reasons behind them were just wrong. We simply didn’t have time to argue with each reviewer and so we just did the additional work to be done with it. Where I worked we had 3 levels of review: A “reports” mentor (depending on which group you were in), a company “Reviewer”, and of course OPM.
To say the entire system, with this particular company, was a cluster-f is just an understatement.
Must not be SCIS if the company has “been doing this a long time.” I’m assuming it’s the other four letter contractor? Recompete? Doesn’t the OPM contract have another two years? Unless you are referring to Option Years.
Laid off GDIT BI here. Having to wreck our brains over which contractor you are referring to, and which you may or may not reveal to us in the near future is preposterous. Our industry and careers are in a major upheaval and here you are playing mind games. Don’t share vital information in this forum unless you can be 100% transparent. Please. I just want to get back to work.
Have to agree. Most likely not SCIS. The scuttlebutt awhile back from some mid management types about the C company was that they were being trained for only one case type and when they began to get hit with other case types (other than T3’s) it caused problems for BI’s and reviewers. I believe it did not set well with OPM (but what do I know).
As a former contract specialist I can tell you that most re-competes are started about a year before they are due. Even if the contract is not due to be re-competed the government can do anything it wants to when it comes to contracts. They can cancel for convenience for example. Given that there is a major change happening with DoD, this could be the trigger. I only mentioned it because they were sending out emails to investigators warning that if you get a survey from OPM it has to do with an upcoming re-compete and you should not ignore it.
I don’t think this contract is due to expire right now, in fact, I think it was recently extended, but I was just passing along a comment that was made to us by our bosses. I thought it was an odd comment.
There are only 3 major players on the contract now, not many people have new information about any major upcoming industry shifts, so it is just taking a guess.
The area I worked previously had four investigators but for whatever reason they lost all of them and it was not due to a lack of work. Perhaps they didn’t like the area or did not like the boss or company, but that was the history I was told. I’m just reporting what I know and what I heard.
When I moved to the area, specifically for this job, then work was sent my way. I don’t know how much work is there long term but they are training one more person to help cover. There are no DoD facilities anywhere near this area and most of the work required a lot of driving. It may not be good for productivity but I enjoyed the driving and most of the interviews.
The area itself was very scenic and very enjoyable to me, if I had liked the circumstances better then I would have stayed long term, but I did not. I’m too old to tolerate BS and so I moved on.
When companies want to hire inexperienced workers so that they can pay them peanuts, instead of hiring some experienced people, then that’s what they get (in response to your comment about the reviewers).
I totally agree. It would be interesting to me to find out how much time and energy is wasted on false re-opens. I know that I consulted my “reports” mentor on two or three of them and she told me how to write a case message to send them back. I always felt like I was taking one or two steps forward and three steps back.
I was shocked to learn that one of my colleagues was already on a mandated “Improvement Plan” because his productivity did not meet the company standard. This is a young guy that really liked the job but was failing due to the poor training methods used by the company. I asked him what he thought the issue was and he said that when he first started he had two different mentors that told him complete opposite ways of doing the job. I had the same exact thing happen to me as well but I figured it out and moved on but it does slow you down. He also complained about a lot of re-opens.
Given what I know now about the job, $16.30 per hour for this job is a joke. Given the detail required and the unending bureaucratic nature of the job it should start out at least double that wage. I regularly made $70K for jobs that didn’t require a fraction of the crap that this job requires.
As a taxpayer, I can only hope that DoD starts over from scratch and designs a completely new system. OPM has nothing to be proud of except growing the swamp of like-minded people.
You were only getting paid $16.30 for this job? Wow, and I thought my $18.00 an hour was bad. I started out at $17.34 but picked up a small “merit” increase along the way. The only thing that has helped have been the quarterly bonuses
I am in the $30’s, and I have to agree about the pay. I was trained by a CACI training and they were actually good. But now, they are cutting corners. I see it when I’m mentoring!
Once you get to the Level II position the pay increases 37%. That’s fine but given the cost of benefits this starting pay is grossly inadequate.
Question: What do you consider an average workload? I was told 9 to 12 interviews in the first 3 days of the week is expected and the other two days are for typing and transmitting reports. Usually by Thursday I had used most of my 40 hours. I did a ton of hours off the clock because I was still learning and getting my materials organized. I got better over time but when you add a few re-opens to the mix I can see getting behind on occasion.
9 - 12 interviews in 3 days seems kind of hectic. I usually do 2 ESI’s and a supervisor/coworker for each ESI, and I usually do that in one day so i’m already almost at my source unit requirement for the week. The rest of the week I’m usually just running out and grabbing some records or interviewing a couple sources for other cases.