The Presidential Management Fellows Program is a two-year training and leadership development program at a United States agency and is administered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. This program is only open to U.S. citizens and those with a recent graduate degree. The program focuses on developing new government leaders in a variety of disciplines and can be a great entry point for a career with the federal government.
Every Tuesday during the month of September 2020, there will be a new informational webinar for prospective graduate students and applicants. The webinars aim to provide a general overview of the program as well as specific details about the 2021 application cycle. Each webinar will have a specific focus, but they are open to all majors to attend.
The webinar on Tuesday, September 8th from 2:00-3:00PM EDT will have a focus on Scientific, Technical, Engineering, and Mathematics fields. You can register to attend this session here.
Another webinar session that might be of interest to readers of the OITE Career Blog is the one with a focus on Public Health. That session will be on Tuesday, September 15 from 2:00-3:00PM EDT and you can register here.
The PMF application will open on September 30, 2020 at 12:00 PM EDT. Once the application opens, it will appear on USAJobs.gov. You can find it by searching for “Presidential Management Fellows”.
The application process for the PMF is often long and includes many steps. The whole PMF application process is outlined here. As noted within the application process, you can see that an online assessment is often the first tool used to evaluate applicants. Many applicants to the PMF program find that the online assessment can be a hard hurdle to jump. The online assessment is taken on your own and covers four dimensions: Situational Judgement, Life Experience, Problem Solving, and Writing. Given the weighty importance of this first assessment, it would be a great idea to familiarize yourself with the rules and policies of the online assessment. A 2021 PMF Assessment Preparation Guide is currently available online until the application closes, which you can check out here.
