reskilling

The Office of Personnel Management and agency partners say the rapid pace of emerging technology can make the goal of building the workforce of the future seem like a moving target.

In today’s Federal Newscast, as part of a new pilot program, the Defense Department awards contracts to five companies to actively recruit technical talent from the private sector.

As part of the Trump administration’s broad efforts to reskill the federal workforce, the Office of Personnel Management has new a toolkit and playbook for agencies to tackle the unknown.

Amid a governmentwide effort to reskill the federal workforce, the Department of Veterans Affairs has taken steps to ensure it has the workforce it needs for a data-centric future.

The Defense Department has agreed to use the Office of Personnel Management’s USALearning platform, which the two agencies said will not only benefit DoD and its efforts to consolidate its business platforms but also the administration’s broad efforts to retrain and reskill the federal workforce.

Attracting in-demand cybersecurity talent to government service could be as simple as retraining current federal employees for the jobs of the future.

The Trump administration is also planning to study the full scope of federal employees’ pay, benefits other opportunities for recognition, in effort to prove to Congress that the workforce would benefit from more flexible performance-based awards over across-the-board pay raises.

The Trump administration said it sees 2019 as the year it plans to win the public’s trust and establish familiarity with the federal workforce that it’s up to the task of deploying artificial intelligence, robotics and other new technology.

The National Science Foundation is looking for concrete, technological ideas through the Career Compass Challenge that it could pilot broad reskilling effort across the federal workforce. But NSF also sees the challenge as a potential spark for culture change.

While agency IT officials recognize the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act and OPEN Government Data Act present opportunities to get more value out of their data, they also see challenges in preparing the workforce to manage all that data.