The need for increased data and technology skills pervades the federal workforce, but the Agriculture Department’s Digital Service (USDA DS) is seeing promising results with a series of partnerships in this area across the department. One of these partnerships, piloted for three months in 2024, focuses on continuous education for existing USDA employees in both technical and soft skills, and is slated for expansion in 2025.

“How we deliver tech, how tech works, and how folks use it is changing so rapidly. So we partner really closely with our AgLearn team … our learning management system across the whole department,” Arianne Gallagher-Welcher, executive director of the USDA Digital Service, told Federal News Network. “What we did this year, working with our Workforce Standing Committee and others, is we have encouraged folks to participate in taking some of those openly available courses on AgLearn, particularly ones that have skill benchmark assessments. So folks can go in on a particular topic, whether it’s both like a technical skill — like database data analysis, data visualization — or … important skills like interpersonal communication and problem solving and negotiation, conflict management.”

Gallagher-Welcher said AgLearn takes initial benchmarks for the employees, then tailors the course to where they’re at, with beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. She said 90% of employees who participated in the pilot increased their skill level from their benchmarks. Participants also gathered to discuss their experiences in the program, ask questions, and brainstorm how to apply the skills they’d learned to their everyday work.

In the interim, before the pilot is expanded, Gallagher-Welcher said the various stakeholders within USDA are focusing on building momentum and thinking about how they’re measuring success in these programs, in order to move forward in a data-driven way. User experience is one main focus; Gallagher-Welcher said they sat down with the 10% of participants who did not increase their skill level in order to determine if it was an issue with the user experience, and if so, where the challenges were.

“As part of the USDA IT Workforce Strategic Plan, we’re working to really mindfully think about how do we assess and look at different skill sets and competencies of our tech workforce on a cyclical basis in a very data-driven and open way so that we’re encouraging, how are we measuring the skill sets that we have and the skill sets we need?” she said. “How do we identify where those gaps are? And then how do we work with our workforce to help figure out where are some of those best ways that skills can be developed? Where are some other ways where we may need to target recruitment and hiring for different skill sets? But how do we use all different pieces of the workforce employee lifecycle to help make sure that we have that set of rounded skills and abilities we need.”

Early-career recruitment

USDA is also trying to attract more early-career tech talent. Gallagher-Welcher said USDA has had a lot of success with the U.S. Digital Corps, a governmentwide Pathways tech talent program run by the General Services Administration.

USDA DS is also working with Handshake, a job platform oriented toward Gen Z used by many colleges and universities, to help the department connect with students through hiring fairs and other career events. Gallagher-Welcher said, using that platform, USDA was able to attract 4,400 people to apply via USAJobs. That’s a considerable uptick, she said, and other metrics from Handshake are likewise promising.

“The USDA OCIO team achieved an average open rate of over 80% across all of their outreach campaigns, and a response rate exceeding 30%, surpassing benchmarks of approximately 48% and 60% for 57 of federal agencies using Handshake’s basic tool. Additionally, the engagement rate for underrepresented candidates reached 33%, significantly higher than the federal average of 12%,” according to statistics from Handshake that Gallagher-Welcher shared.

Accelerated opportunities

But one of the big things that Gen Z looks for as they enter the workforce is cutting-edge technologies. Gallagher-Welcher said she gets a lot of feedback from early-career recruits who are interested in understanding the technology landscape across USDA.

With 29 agencies over eight functional areas, Gallagher-Welcher said USDA’s technology mission covers a wide range of opportunities, from modernizing legacy systems to operating sophisticated geospatial systems and drones for scientific research. She said early-career hires get the opportunity to work on these kinds of things much earlier in their careers than in the private sector, where they’d have to work five to 10 years before getting that chance.

“We really try to hire the best talent and really help deploy them on a lot of the key problems and challenges that we’re having early on,” she said. “And a lot of folks really connect with that and really like coming across and having that challenge day one.”

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