FMA publishes the Hear It from FMA monthly column in the FedManager.com newsletter, which has a circulation of 60,000. In the April edition, we felt it was important to spotlight the achievements of FMA Manager of the Year and President of FMA Chapter 191, Railroad Retirement Board (RRB), Kimberly Price. Kimberly has been an employee of the RRB since 1990, and over the course of her three-decade career has risen through the ranks to her current position as Director of Policy and Systems. She is the first woman and the first African American to hold this coveted executive level position at the RRB.

Kimberly serves as a model for congenial and productive engagement with unions, and works closely with the local AFGE chapter on issues of agreement while ensuring that potential hotspots do not disrupt the smooth operation of her office and the RRB as a whole. FMA’s Adam Kay interviewed Kimberly as part of an article that will appear in the summer issue of The Federal Manager, our quarterly magazine. While the interview touched on a wide variety of subjects, from her tips for new supervisors to her staff’s heroic efforts over the course of the past year, many readers may be particularly interested in what she sees as one of the greatest challenges – and potential opportunities – facing federal agencies; the silver tsunami of retirements that is beginning to crash across the federal workforce. 

“While the pandemic may have pushed some people’s retirement off by a year or so, those retirements are still coming,” Kimberly warned. “There is a lot of institutional knowledge in a place like the RRB, and it is critical that we recruit and mentor the incoming generation of feds to make sure that when they take the place of an outgoing fed with decades of experience, the critical missions assigned to our agencies do not suffer.” To read the full Hear It from FMA article on Kimberly, please click here. And be sure to read more on these topics, and the rest of our interview, in the summer issue of The Federal Manager!