Gov. Tim Walz at a cabinet meeting. Last week, he signed an executive order that, among other things, eliminates the requirement of a four-year college degree for many state jobs. (Glen Stubbe, Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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Several years ago, I asked a senior manager from one of Minnesota's state agencies how things were going. He expressed frustration with some staff turnover he had just experienced. Several talented young professionals he'd recently hired had left, citing concerns about opportunities for personal and professional development and career advancement in government employment.

"I've learned my lesson." the manager said. "Next time, I'm going to look for average."

Such moments of exasperation notwithstanding, state government is not an employer of mass mediocrity. However, in order to attain and retain talent, some changes in the state's employment practices have long been overdue.

The need has become is even more urgent today. Like the state's private sector, Minnesota state government is exposed to the combined threat of an aging population and a lousy rate of in-migration, producing a workforce shortage increasingly being described as a crisis. The risk is amplified with the ambitious expansion of government programs underway this year and all the new staffing that will require.

Gov. Tim Walz's new executive order, "Improving Access to State Employment," includes several efforts to reduce barriers to government employment along with implementing several strategic workforce initiatives. The headline change eliminates the requirement of a a college degree in order to be considered for more than 75% of state government jobs. According to the Brookings Institution, Minnesota is the 14th state to tackle what has been described as the "paper ceiling." Pennsylvania and Virginia have removed degree requirements from 90% of state jobs.

The move represents a fundamentally important shift in state human-resource thinking and practice: a shift to skills-based hiring. It's smart public-sector reform to make it easier to find qualified workers in chronically tight labor markets, with the added advantage of creating more economic mobility for many workers.

The problem is that this effort in many ways is undercut by the fundamental design of the state's human-resource system. The governor's executive order is like fertilizing a struggling houseplant. The effort is meant to strengthen and grow state human resources, but the system is severely "root-bound" — constricted by a dense, tangled mass of centralized bureaucracy the National Academy of Public Administration has described as "a system that forces agency missions to fit personnel processes instead of the other way around."

The prime directive of state human-capital management is not to align the workforce with current and future agency mission requirements. It is not to respond to the changing nature of government work and changing technology and hire, deploy and compensate talent accordingly. Rather, the principal objective of the state's human-capital system is to ensure "compensation equity" across completely unrelated types of government occupations.

This goal is pursued by pigeonholing all state skills sets, knowledge bases and activities into over 1,800 discrete, highly prescriptive "jobs," evaluating and comparing them to assess their relative worth to government. They are then compensated accordingly. In the words of the state: "Evaluating job content rather than individual qualifications or employee performance allows for quantitative comparison of one job to another. Evaluation and comparison provides the foundation for consistent compensation practices."

One can imagine the many ways that subordinating qualifications and performance to what the National Academy of Public Administration calls this "blind pursuit of equity" can throw a monkey wrench into the best plans for attracting and retaining key employees. The attempt to treat more than 1,800 disparate jobs "equally" makes wage compression inevitable and essentially guarantees significantly below-market wages for critical skill sets needed in government.

Collectively bargained workforce rules can further complicate matters. Seniority rights and other contract provisions restrict management's discretion to fill vacancies and assign and allocate talent where it's needed. Thirty years ago, the Report of the National Commission on State and Local Public Service concluded: "[T]he basic purpose of the civil service system has been forgotten: to recruit the most talented among our citizens in government, not to employ legions of classification experts and personnel administrators who spend days tracing bumping routes and rewriting job descriptions."

Citizens, of course, have a major stake in all this. The state is embarking on the greatest expansions of government programming in its history. The more demand for both the quantity and quality of public services increases, the more relentless government must be in pursuing innovation and enhancing efficiency and accountability. Otherwise, costs could explode, damaging the state's business climate and quality of life. Human-capital management is a foundation of this pursuit.

The executive order is a nice start, but a lot more work needs to be done.

Mark Haveman is executive director of the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence.