... it's a very difficult project and will probably never work right after you spend 10 hours trying to make it work. I have tacked these kind of projects before, and imho it just ain't worth it.
I suggest that you get your uniqueness in the [Record ID#] and create a prefix or suffix as you like. The employee numbers will not be sequential within Programs and I would suggest that you "push back" against that part of the request.
You can then also have an override field to override the generated EE # for those EEs in multiple programs.
If you did want to try to automate this (which I really do not recommend), then you will need to have a table with programs and the EE's will be children of those programs. Then you need to summarize up the max record ID# for all EE's in that program and look that up down to the EEs and then snapshot it. Then in fact you need to change the summary field to be the max of that snapshot field.
If you somehow end up with duplicates then you will need to manually override. It's a quagmire.
