The U.S. Digital Service and Office of Federal Procurement Policy are putting $360,000 up for grabs for the development of a better way to train federal contracting employees to buy digital services.

USDS and OFPP released the “Digital Service Contracting Professional Training and Development Program” challenge Wednesday with the submission of ideas starting Saturday. Submissions will remain open through June 23.

“(The program) will be used to add a digital service core-plus specialization for contracting professionals under the Federal Acquisition Certification in Contracting (FAC-C) Program issued by OFPP,” the notice stated on Challenge.gov. “The final results of the challenge will be provided to federal training institutions, such as the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI) and Defense Acquisition University (DAU), for those institutions to implement and maintain the program. This program will be one of many initiatives to foster transformative change in the federal digital service acquisition culture.”

OFPP and USDS want the training program to focus on strategic thinking, incorporating industry best practices and could include rotational assignments, mentoring, in-classroom training and detail assignments. The notice stated that the program should take no longer than six months to complete.

“A definition of a successful digital service buyer, novel ideas, leading-edge approaches and iterative methodologies are highly encouraged in response to this Challenge,” the notice stated.

The challenges comes as agencies are under a mandate from the Office of Management and Budget to develop digital services offices by the end of the fiscal year as well as take advantage of these skillsets to address long-standing challenges with citizen-facing services.

The White House also requested$105 million in in its fiscal 2016 budget request sent to Congress in February for digital services. At the same time it asked the Commerce, Education and Treasury departments, the General Services Administration and the Small Business Administration to pilot the concept of idea labs to create “a culture of innovation that yields results.”

As OFPP and USDS kick off the challenge, agencies were given excepted hiring authority from the Office of Personnel Management earlier this month to hire digital services and other IT experts.

But even if agencies hire the best implementers of digital services, understanding the procurement piece of any project remains one of the key ingredients to success.

That’s why OFPP and USDS hope the training program gives

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