The process for security clearance reciprocity needs to change

Recruitment and succession planning are the two “pressing needs” within the Department of Homeland Security’s IT and cybersecurity talent portfolio, Deputy CIO Stephen Rice said Thursday. Federal IT staff lacks “technical depth” in the area of cloud architecture, as well as zero-trust and software-defined networking, Rice said at an AFCEA luncheon in Arlington, Virginia. Amazon’s promise to

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig cited IT modernization Wednesday as one of his agency’s most pressing priorities in the coming years. Rettig told the Senate Finance Committee the service has a business plan in place to modernize its IT systems that would cost between $2.3 billion and $2.7 billion over the next six years, starting with $290 million

The Department of Labor should develop better ways to track automation’s effects on jobs because current workforce data doesn’t explain employment shifts, according to a recent report. In analyzing the employment trends and job characteristics of 16 firms researchers felt were susceptible to automation, the Government Accountability Office found those that saw growth in technology

A public-private partnership including 11 federal agencies on Tuesday launched the Cybersecurity Talent Initiative to improve the workforce pipeline to hundreds of thousands of cyber-related vacancies. Through the new program, graduating or recently graduated college students may apply for a two-year cybersecurity placement at a federal agency, after which they’ll be eligible for a full-time

The Trump administration has given its final ruling on direct-hire authority for mission-critical IT positions, and it looks exactly like the draft regulation it proposed last October. The Office of Personnel Management issued its final rule, to be published Wednesday morning in the Federal Register, adopting the proposal without changes. It gives agency heads the authority to

The National Science Foundation announced five winners Friday for the first phase of its Career Compass challenge — a competition to crowdsource ideas for technology solutions that will help federal workers plan for the changing nature of work. The winners, which described of tech-enabled solutions to help reskill and upskill the federal workforce, came from a pool

A new policy that would give agency heads direct-hire authority for mission-critical IT positions will be finalized soon. Margaret Weichert, deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget, announced Thursday at FedScoop’s IT Modernization Summit that the final regulation for IT direct-hire authority will be published on the Federal Register in a

The Department of Homeland Security requested $11.4 million in fiscal 2020 to fund the launch of a personnel system for hiring cybersecurity talent. First detailed in the administration’s reorganization plan last summer, the Cyber Talent Management System is described as an “agile and innovative personnel system” that better equips DHS to “compete for cyber talent with

The Trump administration’s President’s Management Agenda turned a year old Wednesday. While federal officials in charge of the plan spent the day championing its early successes, particularly those tied to IT modernization, they also emphasized how important the next few years are to sustaining longer-term transformation — that any achievements in this first year won’t

One-fourth of CFO Act agencies have not completed a key requirement of a 2015 law that was intended to bring more rigor to how the federal government categorizes and fills cybersecurity jobs, a new report from the Government Accountability Office says. Six of the 24 agencies surveyed by GAO had not “completed assigning the associated