Federal agencies face more than a wage-scale disadvantage when competing with commercial firms for technology talent. They also have to overcome rigid hiring rules which tend to disqualify promising candidates and discourage others from seeing a path for growth, say private sector workforce experts. Those hurdles are hardly new to government. However, they’re becoming more formidable as a broader U.S. shortage of technology and cybersecurity workers continues to hobble federal…

Federal IT leaders foresee a significant need for a wide range of IT skills at their agencies over the next two years, with the greatest demand expected for specialists in cloud networking and application development, artificial intelligence, data analysis and enterprise engineering, according to a new survey. The rapid evolution of cloud-based computing services, the need to meet citizens’ digital services expectations and the explosive growth of data are placing…

The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service has a few ideas on how the federal government can better attract and retain IT and cybersecurity talent. In a recently released staff memorandum, the bipartisan commission offered its preliminary findings and thoughts. The memo was released in tandem with a hearing on critical skills and benefits held

The White House Office of Management and Budget and the Federal CIO Council announced Tuesday that they have opened applications for the second round of the new, and popular, Federal Cyber Reskilling Academy. “With over 1,500 applications to the first cohort, there clearly is an interest for cyber security within the federal government,” Suzette Kent, federal CIO,

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 Pentagon has made big plans to adopt artificial intelligence across the department, but two very large hurdles stand in the way of that goal, its new chief data officer said Wednesday: structuring data and recruiting the talent to manage it. “You can’t feed the algorithms if you don’t have data. Solid, clean data in large volumes, well-tagged

The Office of Personnel Management has proposed delegating direct hire authority for IT professionals to agency heads. OPM published a proposed regulation Monday in the Federal Register that would give CFO Act agencies the direct hire authority (DHA) rather than reserving that power for itself. The regulation cites the recent executive order “Enhancing the Effectiveness of

Despite numerous laws, executive orders and administrative cajoling, federal agencies still haven’t fully defined the authorities of CIOs when it comes to managing their IT enterprise. As a result, the tech executives are being held accountable for the management and modernization of IT systems, often when they don’t have the workforce or the investment authority