New guidance from OPM on recruiting, retaining cyber talent

The Federal Headlines is a daily compilation of the stories you hear discussed on Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

• The Office Personnel Management released new guidance to help agencies recruit and retain cybersecurity professionals. OPM put out two new tools. One is a detailed guide on flexibilities agencies have to attract and compensate new cyber talent. The other describes other incentives, besides pay, that agencies can offer. It’s part of the Obama administration’s federal cybersecurity workforce strategy to hire at least 6,000 new cyber professionals in 2016. (Chief Human Capital Officers Council)

• President Barack Obama officially submitted his alternative plan for pay increases for federal employees, calling for a 0.6 percent raise in locality pay. This would be coupled with the 1 percent across-the-board pay raise for all feds. Obama said this plan was needed to stop locality pay from automatically increasing nearly 30 percent, a move agencies could not afford. (Federal News Radio)

• Those serving in the military could see a pay raise slightly higher than that. The reconciled 2017 defense authorization bill between the House and Senate will include a 2.1 percent pay increase for active duty military. It would be the largest military pay increase in at least three years, should it become law. The bill could hit the House floor by Friday. (Federal News Radio)

• Congress is shaking up the Defense Department’s acquisition office with that final version of the 2017 defense authorization bill. It gets rid of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. In its place will be a research and engineering chief and a role to manage day-to-day business acquisition for DoD. (Federal News Radio)

• After reports surfaced that Congress is considering extending the continuing resolution through May to fund the government, Defense Secretary Ash Carter sent a letter to lawmakers bashing the idea. Carter said putting DoD under budget constraints for two-thirds of the fiscal year is “unacceptable.” He urged Congress to find a new approach. (Federal News Radio)

• The Defense Department said it used a flawed process when it decided to bar the nation’s largest for-profit college from receiving military tuition assistance funds last year. Peter Levine, the department’s top personnel official, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that department officials followed policy when they decided to suspend the University of Phoenix from enrolling new military students with DoD tuition assistance funds, but that the department should have warned the school it was about to be suspended and give it a chance to respond. He said the department is updating its policies accordingly. Phoenix’s suspension has since been lifted, but DoD has imposed similar bans on four other for-profit schools, including for deceptive or overly aggressive marketing practices. (Federal News Radio)

• The Commerce Department is in the middle of re-configuring its human resources shop as it shifts more transactional work to an HR shared services provider. Commerce Chief Human Capital Officer Kevin Mahoney said that means existing HR employees would likely have different kinds of jobs in the future. Those employees would have to go through training to learn a more strategic skill set. (Federal News Radio)

• The General Services Administration is upgrading to a new time and attendance and other human resources systems. GSA awarded IBM a $149 million  contract to provide the technology behind its next generation HR T2T Program. GSA said the new technologies would let its customers have easier access to modern HR and time and attendance systems through self-service capabilities and mobile devices, and it will reduce duplicate data entry requirements. The current systems are not integrated and built on older technologies. (General Services Administration)

• The Homeland Security Department is making good on its strategy to change how it manages software development. Thirteen companies received contracts under the Flexible Agile Support for the Homeland program known as FLASH. The deal, a one-year base plus two optional years, has a potential value of $1.5 billion. All the awardees are small companies specializing in agile development. All have offices in the D.C. area. DHS said 114 companies competed. (FedBizOpps)

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