President Olin King has initiated a strategic planning effort that includes rewriting our mission and vision statements. "So many changes are taking place,” King said, “that we find ourselves in a dynamic environment for excluded employees. If we don’t plan, we will be ill-prepared to deal with our future.”

 

The immediate future portends a slow economy, threats to state workers’ incomes, benefits and even jobs and the potential loss of nearly half of the state’s supervisors and managers to retirement in the next five years. There’s good news, too: DPA, with ACSS’ involvement, is overhauling and simplifying the state’s job classifications and hiring process; and ACSS has taken the first successful steps toward forming a partnership with DPA to offer training to help supervisors and managers increase their salaries by improving their job skills.

 

We held our first joint meeting of executive board and staff Nov. 13 to discuss the scope of our strategic planning. A few conclusions:

 

We will continue the planning process when the board and staff get together for our next board meeting Jan. 10 in Sacramento.

 

“We are trying to ascertain what our members’ needs are and to be responsive to them,” King said.