Federal Insights

Workplace Reimagined 2024: ONCD’s Seeyew Mo on growing federal cyber workforce

The White House office’s effort to hire employees into the federal 2210 job series — with a focus on skills and not education — makes headway.

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

August 26, 2024 11:45 am

7 min read

When it comes to open cybersecurity positions nationwide, Seeyew Mo doesn’t want to focus on the 500,000 number often bandied about.

The focus should be on expanding who and what positions are considered part of the cyber workforce, said Mo, assistant national cyber director for workforce, training and education in the White House’s Office of National Cyber Director.

“Instead of going after the same small group of top talent, we’re trying to make sure the talent pie is bigger. A lot of conversations that we have had in terms of what ONCD has been doing is we have been linking the cyber workforce needs with the overall president’s agenda as we think about how we want to grow the pipeline,” Mo said during Federal News Network’s Workplace Reimagined Exchange 2024.

“We should use that number as a way to think about it as how big of an opportunity this is for those who are looking for a cyber career — and also for the government policymakers. It’s like, ‘Hey, we better start stepping up and working together or else this problem will continue to grow.’ ”

And growing the pie, Mo said, will take a whole-of-government approach that is coordinated, cohesive and connected with the private sector.

Since the release of the National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy in July 2023, the Biden administration has worked with industry to plan to hire 20,000 people into the cyber workforce. Agencies have led the effort to place more than 13,000 people in cyber apprentice positions and have seen more than $95 million in investments by the nonprofits, academia and the private sector to support education and training initiatives.

“We need to broaden the group of people who are interested in doing cyber work. That means we need to reach people that we haven’t been reaching before — from the rural areas, more women, more underrepresented and underserved individuals, folks from different regions of the country,” he said.

“We’re taking this whole-of-nation approach because we know that while the government can do a lot, no single actor has the silver bullet to solve the problem. We’re pretty proud of our work. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but from an ONCD standpoint, we need to make sure that we have some form of federal cohesion to solve this problem.”

Public, private cyber partnerships growing

Over the last year, ONCD has worked with a host of interagency partners, including those in the national security sector as well as the departments of Commerce and Labor to expand their cyber workforce and training investments.

Mo said ONCD and other agencies are going to community colleges and universities, as well as working with public and private partners to make sure cyber training is broadly available. For example, the Labor is offering $440 million in grants for organizations to invest in apprenticeships, with cybersecurity being a major component of that effort.

“We need to make sure that people, regionally and locally, are taking the initiative. The federal government can set the direction, but really it requires a lot of public and private partnerships,” Mo said. “That’s what we call the ecosystem approach, and which is why when we talk about successes, we can talk about what the federal government is doing, but oftentimes we also need state and local government, the private sector, nonprofit, academia and labor organizations to be doing that with us.”

But some of the most impactful work ONCD has undertaken over the past year has been with the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management to transition the 2210 series for federal IT workers to skill-based hiring.

The idea behind skills-based hiring is to focus more on a job candidate’s talent and abilities — through skills assessments and other means — instead of only relying on education and direct experience.

By some estimates, between 70% and 80% of all 2210s — almost 100,000 positions — have some cybersecurity responsibilities attached to them.

Mo said the transition should be done in fiscal 2025.

“This is actually not as easy as turning off the switch or turning on the switch in some way. We have to think about, what does it mean when someone is qualifying for the job? This is a qualification policy, and then we need to know how to classify them,” he said.

“Once someone has the job, we want to place them in the right position. We need to pay them. How do we classify someone if we no longer have some of these degree requirements or experience requirements because we’re using skills-based hiring now? Then, finally, how do we do skills assessments? ONCD and our White House partners are working very closely with OPM to make sure that we are framing and shaping this and taking the appropriate steps so that we can do this in a way that achieves our goal. We have to remember that these are policies that affect real people’s lives. We have to get it right.”

Inventory of federal IT jobs in the works

As part of the transition to skills-based hiring, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) framework, which defines specific cyber workforce roles, earlier this year added several new competency areas and updated skills and tasks to try to help agencies better understand and meet their cyber workforce needs

Along with the 2210 transition, ONCD, OMB and OPM also are creating an inventory of cyber jobs across government, starting with the 2210s.

Mo said initial data shows there are about 3,000 jobs that were open in the 2210 series in 2024 that had a connection to cybersecurity.

“We’re continuing on this work, and we want to make sure that we’re getting these things right,” he said. “What we plan to do is socialize this information more interagency to figure out how we can work together to fill some of these roles in a more efficient manner. We have to solve this problem in many, many different areas.”

One way to solve this challenge is through a tech hiring sprint scheduled for later this fall to recruit for cyber workers. Mo said while there are a lot of things about the sprint that still need to be decided, such as what positions to focus on, the ideas is to help agencies adopt recruitment and hiring best practices to see what works best.

Encouraging government contractors to adopt skills-based hiring

At the same time as ONCD, OMB and OPM are focused on federal workers, the Energy Department is leading a corresponding initiative to move federal IT contracts to skills-based hiring.

Mo said he has briefed the Chief Acquisition Officers Council about the need to remove some barriers in contracts to let vendors bring on workers with specific cyber skills.

“ONCD is currently coordinating and working with OMB on the best path forward through discussions with multiple departments and agencies to see what are some of the opportunities to actually have some quick wins, so that we can build some successes,” he said. “One of the things that I want to highlight is there’s actually some commonality in the federal workforce side and the contracting side. As we try to remove these barriers and pivot the skills base, we essentially need to think about: How do we do assessments? There are elements that we can work on together and share so that folks don’t have to feel like they have to do it all by themselves because we know this is a big change.”

Going forward, Mo said ONCD’s priorities will continue to focus on growing the cybersecurity workforce pie, whether it be through new or existing resources or by working with specific agencies to improve programs and outcomes.

Continued engagement with Congress also remains a top priority.

“A lot of times, even during my testimony, I make sure that the congressional members on the committee understand that these also mean jobs in their districts. I think we have an enormous opportunity here to have a generational shift, to get more people into these good paying, meaningful jobs that also protect our country,” Mo said.

“One of the things I want to repeat is that a lot of the cyber jobs are also in private sector, in state and local governments, especially some of the jobs in the utilities and health care sectors. Those are not federal jobs, so to speak. But we need cyber talent there too. So, unless we grow the pie, we’re not going to have enough people to do the work, both for the federal government and for the national cyber workforce.”

Discover more articles and videos now on Federal News Network’s Workplace Reimagined Exchange 2024 event page.