The Office of Personnel Management’s tech hiring initiative is giving NASA a boost in acquiring top-tier talent to help solve some of its hardest problems.
The Office of Personnel Management’s tech hiring initiative is giving NASA a major boost in acquiring top-tier talent to help solve some of its hardest and most critical problems.
NASA Force, which the space agency launched in March, already has a pool of 600 qualified applicants it’s looking to potentially hire into temporary positions to help move some of its most important programs forward more quickly.
NASA Force serves as a pipeline from OPM’s Tech Force program to give the space agency access to uniquely-experienced and specialized industry workers — something NASA has been pursuing for a while.
NASA Chief Human Capital Officer Kelly Elliott said the program works in a complimentary way with the agency’s traditional hiring mechanisms, but it gives the organization access to a workforce it’s found more difficult to attract.
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“What NASA Force allows us to do is to bring folks in for a one to two year period of time where they can immediately solve some of our complex challenges, and someone that we may hire that’s earlier career may not have the skills and the ability to do that,” Elliott told Federal News Network’s Terry Gerton in a recent interview. “It’s about partnering individuals who have a proven ability to solve complex challenges, who have an incredible set of expertise and who can immediately hit the ground running in mentoring our folks and bringing them to the next level.”
Elliott said NASA had wanted to pursue industry exchanges for years to help give career workers know-how and perspective they can’t get in government.
“We also think that it’s important for someone, and a really great opportunity for someone who doesn’t want a federal service career for 20 to 30 years to come in. This could be actually really pivotal for their career as well,” she said.
Elliott said they were especially targeting workers in cutting-edge technologies, pointing to nuclear engineering as an example.
“Nuclear engineers may not have the opportunity to come and work at NASA for 20 to 30 years on our incredible missions, but coming for one to two years would allow us to really [benefit] from their expertise and really help move our projects forward,” she said.
Tech Force functions to not only amplify recruiting, but to do it with speed. Elliott said a recent posting for an aerospace engineering role garnered 2,400 applications in five days.
“I think that Tech Force not only is our marketing arm, but… under [OPM] Director Scott Kupor’s leadership, they’ve opened some doors for a broader industry partnership in really talking to industry about our country’s and the federal government’s need to solve some really complex challenges,” Elliott said. “They’ve brought forward industry training that folks in Tech Force and ultimately in NASA Force will benefit from.”
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Tech Force is also helping NASA identify the best applicants for the new program. Elliott said they’re not doing any less thorough of a review of applicants than under normal hiring, and they’re utilizing leadership and expertise from within their own organizations to make determinations.
“As we partner within a human capital workforce, or, with our team, we partner with subject matter experts to really, really analyze the person’s background, not only looking at resumes, but participating in an interview process,” she said. “So, we don’t anticipate bringing anyone in that we’ve not fully vetted by the other experts because it takes oftentimes an expert to be able to ask those really hard questions and really to identify the true experts that we need to bring in.”
NASA is far from the first government agency to pursue exchanges with industry, nonprofit or educational organizations. Elliott said she’s got a variety of models to draw from, including the Department of Defense’s industry exchange program.
“I think this group of individuals that would come at NASA Force would fit in and would be a civil servant employee as part of our workforce,” she said. “They would be a part of the team. There would be no barriers for what they could work on, what intellectual property we could share with them.”
“We would like for them to be a part of a cohort. We’d like for them to benefit from the things that OPM is building as part of Tech Force. But we’d love for them to learn from each other and for us to kind of use that as a core set of individuals to get feedback, as innovators, to help NASA, not only for the projects that they’re doing, but to help us change our culture long-term,” she said.
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