Near the end of 2018, the White House announced the launch of its much-anticipated cyber reskilling academy, the pioneering initiative of a much broader Trump administration plan to ensure that the federal workforce would be prepared to do the work of the future.
By all accounts, that retraining will be sorely needed. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that 400,000 federal employees will need to be reskilled — nearly 20 percent of the government’s current workforce.
But the federal cyber reskilling pilot, for all its promise, fell short.
Many graduates of the program, while possessing government experience and the latest training in their new field, did not have the years of cybersecurity experience specifically needed to secure government jobs that paid as well or better than what they already held.
OMB Deputy Director for Management Margaret Weichert, however, painted a rosier picture when speaking to reporters Feb. 10 — calling the reskilling pilots a demonstration of the “art of the possible” to inspire individual agencies to invest in their own programs.
But, considering the experiences of that inaugural class, why should agencies bother?
Signposts of success
The White House’s new cyber initiative is not the first training, or upskilling, initiative in the federal government.
According to an OPM official that spoke to Federal Times about the government training tactics, federal employees should be creating individual development plans with their managers as part of the performance management process — plotting out the frequency and type of training they need to move along their career path.
“Every year they should be thinking about when is their next opportunity to learn something, either within their field or in some way that will augment their current position,” the official, who agreed to speak on background, said.
“Agencies tend to have robust programs, they’re very mature at this state, and they’re always looking at how they can close skills gaps in their mission critical occupations. They’re always looking at how they can build efficiencies.”
Programs outside individual agencies also offer the opportunity for employees to leave their current positions on hold while they go to develop broader skills.
The MITRE Corp., which manages several federally funded research and development centers that support various U.S. government agencies, offers a systems engineering fellowship for employees to gain experience by working on government projects, while simultaneously studying for a master’s degree at the University of Virginia. Such a program requires comprehensive agency buy-in from the get-go.
“It’s a big commitment for any federal agency to pay $40,000 for an accelerated master’s program, and then — in this time where there are shortfalls in federal employees — to dedicate an employee to be out of the office for a year,” said John Kreger, vice president at MITRE. “So certainly, that commitment from the agency is required.”
The potential benefit is clear: An employee, upon returning to the organization, can better understand the complexity of these tough, cross-agency challenges, can teach others and potentially formulate solutions.
Different federal agencies also offer similar programs within the government, where employees can leave to train at another agency for a limited period of time, such as the OPM HR Fellows program.
“What we did tell them as they were going back is, ‘know that there are other people that were sitting in your same chairs for six months to a year while you were gone; their work hasn’t changed, so you want to come in with your ideas, but incrementally,’” the OPM official said.
“We tell them, ‘don’t expect that your current job is going to transform either.’”
And then there are programs that introduce industry professionals and feds to the most sought-after leadership and collaboration skills while outside the office, like ACT-IAC’s trio of Associates, Voyagers and Partners programs.
“We form up pairs, where an industry person is partnered up with a government person, and they go on a deep learning experience for nine or 10 months, with a focus on honing their leadership skills,” said ACT-IAC CEO David Wennergren.
“But, of course, the other prize that takes place is the relationships that are formed.”
According to Leslie Barry, ACT-IAC’s director of professional development, the Partners program’s success — having graduated its 1000th fellow after over two decades of the program — lies in creating an understanding between government and industry that enables both to be more creative and facilitates pipelines of new talent into government service.
Ideally, a close relationship between the program and an agency means that managers will prepare for the employee to return by scheduling sessions to share lessons learned or grooming them for a promotion based on the new skillset. But, in reality, the depth of advance planning for upskilled employees can change from agency to agency, and the type of training can have an important impact on whether the employee ultimately reaps rewards.
Out with the old, in with the new
Often, many of the training programs add skills on top of the employee’s current career path, but that kind of reskilling only works for a certain sect of federal employees whose jobs may be in danger from technological advancement or automation.
The White House intends to launch a robotic process automation reskilling academy, which has the potential to teach employees how to manage the new tools that will be taking over the more routine elements of their work. Such an employee then has a stronger chance of keeping their job or receiving a promotion, because they already have the skills needed to manage advanced technologies.
It’s a story that has a long history in government. Consider the experience of Dorothy Vaughn, the legendary NASA mathematician who recognized in the late 1950s and early 1960s that digital computers would supplant human calculations and taught herself and the women she supervised how to use programming languages.
That education enabled her and other women to continue and expand their employment at the agency even as it phased out their former jobs.
But it’s far easier to transition to a career path that is so new that nobody has experience in it than it is to start from scratch targeting a role that requires years of experience to justify higher pay.
Situations where employees’ jobs will go away entirely are rare, according to OPM. But it’s on agency leadership to plan for such occasions well in advance, if they want workers to have a chance at transitioning from one job to another. That process takes at least two years, ideally, and constant communication with impacted employees at every step.
OPM offers a reskilling toolkit under its Accelerating the Gears of Transformation initiative to guide both managers and employees through the process.
“When they do that, they’re able to do it efficiently, effectively and the employees get right on board,” the OPM official said.
OPM is coming out with a new series of tools in coming months, which will provide what officials describe as “nuts and bolts” — so if it’s happening to you, you can decide what to do next.
Rigid structures ... to break or not to break?
Weichert has pointed to the rigidity of the federal hiring system as a core problem impacting the cyber reskilling academy’s success.
The General Schedule relies on a strict set of education and experience qualifications for an applicant to be considered for the position, which the Trump administration has argued can prevent the best candidate from making it through the selection process and restrict movement in and out of government.
Consider that according to BLS educational data, positions including network administrator, computer network architect, IT support specialist and network support specialist across the country are occupied 40 to 50 percent of the time by employees that hold less than a bachelor’s degree. And yet, the federal workforce over-whelmingly favors employees with college degrees. Only 12 percent of feds hold less than a bachelor’s degree, according to 2017 Congressional Budget Office data.
In its fiscal 2021 budget proposal, the White House suggested removing degree requirements from federal job listings to open those positions up to more unconventional experience paths.
But proposals to do away with the GS system have been met with skepticism, as federal employee groups worry that its removal could also do away with the vital protections that ensure career employees are qualified for the mission of the agency — and not just politically or personally convenient.
According to Wennergren, part of the ACT-IAC fellowships’ success has been that it pushes people along a designated career path and eventually provides employees with the five executive core qualifications — leading change, leading people, results driven, business acumen and building coalitions — that are required to make it into the Senior Execurive Service.
“At the beginning, you tend to get a job that focuses on your technical expertise. And then, at some point, you start to transition from the action officer/doer to the manager,” he said.
So, mid-career, that employee starts to pick up leadership and supervisory skills and hits the next inflection point: when he or she starts to want to move from GS-15 to SES.
“The key issue for us collectively right now is the future of work, and it spans so many things,” Wennergren continued.
“The current workforce needs to learn new skills, because the world is radically changing. The skill that may have brought you here may not be the skill you need going forward. The nature of jobs is going to fundamentally change, and we need to get ahead of that now.”
When agencies prepare their workforce sufficiently in advance, those employees may have the opportunity to see an increase in the GS level as the new technology comes into play at the agency.
But even that is under the best of circumstances. And actually moving up isn’t always possible.
In those cases where a specific role is going away, the agency may have an opportunity to train that employee in a completely different area. But that employee also may not be able to continue to move up the standard career ladder at times.
At best, those employees may see a much more gradual trajectory in terms of promotions, said one OPM official. At worst, they may be forced to start over.
In the case of the cyber reskilling academy, the problem could have stemmed from participants not understanding that risk, or even the broad scope of the project. Gaining the skills was step one. But step two, which was required before graduates could see comparable pay to prior roles, may have been gaining the experience.
And, just because the participants weren’t all able to get the kind of positions they hoped for, it doesn’t mean that the White House sees the cyber reskilling pilot as a failure.
“The first two cohorts of the reskilling academy were a success. We trained 50 employees in cyberdefense, and we learned what can be improved as we scale the program,” Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent told Federal Times.
“We look forward to implementing this model throughout the government, both to grow our cybersecurity workforce and for other hard-to-hire critical skills.”
According to an OMB official, the pilot answered three important questions that will inform later cyber training initiatives:
1. Are there federal employees, both inside and outside the IT community, that are interested in gaining these skills?
2. From those interested, is it possible to identify the people that will be highly successful?
3. What actions are necessary to get those that are trained into federal jobs?
Over 2,300 people applied for the reskilling program, and those that participated passed at higher rates and with better scores than the private sector average, according to the official. To get people in the right jobs, additional initiatives — such as a rotational program that offers concrete experience — may need to be added.
The pilot was also designed to focus on the skills that were most generally in need across the federal government, rather than map its participants to specific jobs at a certain GS level. This means that feds will have to look at such programs not for their immediate ability to put them in new jobs, but for their long-term value of ensuring that the employee will be a widely capable asset to agency needs in the future.
And part of the success of any training or reskilling initiative will come down to how willing the employees themselves are to embrace change in the first place.
Positive testimonials, high success rates and even the promise of a higher-paying position may not always be enough to convince an employee that has been doing the same job their whole lives to start on an entirely new career track.
The administration’s next reskilling initiative — robotic process automation — aims to be far more specific in its approach.
The administration has reached out to agencies like the IRS, whose workforce has perceptibly shrunk and whose operations would likely benefit from increased automation, to prepare the workforce for the incoming changes.
“We’re going to the agencies and saying, ‘we know that you are bringing in RPA and you need to train your people; let us help you to train the people that are being impacted today with those technologies, so they can use the skills they gain immediately,’” the OPM official said.
“When it’s happening within the agency, totally connected to the mission and the work that they’re doing, you’re going to have much better outcomes than when we’re doing things all across government without considering the specific employees in their current role.”
Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.
