Intelligence and defense agencies must not only attract digital-savvy new recruits and upskill their current employees but also need to update their career development processes to retain both groups over the longer term, former Defense Department (DoD) Chief Information Officer (CIO), John Sherman, said on Sept. 16.
Sherman – who is now dean at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M – said during an Intelligence and National Security Alliance webinar on workforce development that the intelligence community must update its career development practices to effectively leverage today’s talent environment.
“If your career development feels like it’s from the 1990s, it probably is,” said Sherman. He added that despite efforts to improve career services, the rigid and traditional structures within agencies can be stifling for a creative, modern generation of employees.
“From a generation that is super creative [and] digital, if they are going to experience inflexibility, yes, they’ll do the mission … they’ll work for that mission … but the highly laddered, structured, ‘because we said so,’ and ‘this is what you must do to get from pay band four to pay band five,’ it can be suffocating,” Sherman said.
“We’ve got to think differently. And if it feels bureaucratic, it is bureaucratic. Give them latitude,” he said. Reflecting on his career from an imagery analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to DoD CIO, Sherman said he had to “swim against the tide” of an often-inflexible career development bureaucracy, despite having creative and gifted mentors.
“More often than not, the mid-level was trying to hang on and not allow [change],” Sherman said. “If you feel like that is happening in your agency, that’s going to kill retention as fast as anything, and you will lose them because they are so talented.”
However, Sherman did commend the Federal government’s recent shift to a skills-based hiring approach, which prioritizes technical training, certifications, and competencies over traditional academic qualifications, as a strategy to attract more talent.
Competing With Industry for Talent
Kimberly King, career services manager for analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Office of Human Resources, highlighted the Federal government’s struggle to retain talent amid competition from higher-paying private sector jobs for in-demand skills.
“The quality of new talent that we are getting is phenomenal,” said King, but retaining them is a challenge.
According to King, the Federal government can attract tech savvy talent with “incredible missions,” but it’s challenging to retain that talent in the face of higher-paying private sector jobs.
“We’re just not competitive when it comes to pay, and probably never will fully close that gap,” King said. “But if we really want to recruit and retain the top talent, we need to do better.”
DIA, for example, has rolled out a new pay model to attract college students from certain technical fields to fill science, technology, engineering and mathematics roles. According to King, DIA is addressing pay, representation, and using data to understand and mitigate attrition.
