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Cybersecurity Civil Servants: OPM to Create Cyber Career Track

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Photo: PinkShot

As cybersecurity awareness continues to increase throughout the federal space, the government’s personnel office has good news for future cyber workers.

Nancy Kichak, chief human capital officer of the Office of Personnel Management, said her agency is looking into creating a separate federal career track for cybersecurity.

Now, most cybersecurity employees fall under the IT management 2210 series. But, in an interview with Federal News Radio, Kichak said OPM was “trying to figure out if that’s the appropriate thing or if a new series is needed.”

OPM will work with the CIO Council, a collection of chief information officers from a number of federal agencies, as well as the White House cybersecurity task force to determine “consistency in the base skills that the cyber workforce needs,” Kichak said.

She also suggested the new classification would help in shoring up the patches in the federal cyber workforce. Recent reports have raised the alarm of a shortage of adequate cybersecurity personnel working in government.

“This is not just about determining a new class,” Kichak said. “It’s also about helping agencies figure out how to recruit and find the people they need to do their work.”

The news of a new cyber-career track comes after a high-profile overhaul of federal IT reform initiated by the Office of Management and Budget and federal CIO Vivek Kundra.

While one of the provisions creates a professional track for federal IT managers, in a White House briefing on the proposed reforms, Kundra did not spend much time dwelling on cybersecurity.

When asked by cyber news and analysis website The New New Internet about why cybersecurity seemed to be omitted, Kundra said cybersecurity is a “given,” and that creating a single bullet point around it would minimize its importance.

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