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Bill Would Extend Defense IT Worker Exchange Program

By Brittany Ballenstedt // 11:09 AM ET

Two House lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation that would extend a pilot program at the Defense Department that enables the exchange of Defense IT workers with their counterparts in private industry.

The bill (H.R. 2105), sponsored by Reps. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., and Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., would enable the Defense Department to continue the Information Technology Exchange Pilot program that authorizes the temporary assignment of Defense IT employees to private sector organizations. The program also gives Defense the authority to accept private sector IT employees.

“Our country faces serious cyber threats,” Kilmer said in a statement. “In order to do everything we can to defend ourselves, we need our military to have access to the most up-to-date private sector talent and technology.”

The ITEP program launched last spring, implementing a section of the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. The program enables temporary assignments of up to two years for Defense IT employees at the equivalent of a GS-11 level or above.

The legislation touts the benefits of exchanging ideas and cultures across government, private industry and academia by exposing Defense IT employees to best practices from the private sector, and by allowing those in industry to learn more about how ...

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Ten Key Skills for Landing a Big Data Job

By Brittany Ballenstedt // May 22, 2013

Federal agencies and private sector companies alike are finding big data talent is in short supply. A recent study by the Government Business Council (the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, Nextgov's parent organization) and Booz Allen Hamilton found that while most federal managers are optimistic about promise of big data, many lack the skills to understand and use it effectively.

Now, a look inside Dice.com’s new Open Web sourcing tool reveals 10 skills hiring managers are searching for in big data talent. Those skills are all in combination with Hadoop, an open-source software framework that supports the processing of large amounts of unstructured data.

Hiring managers by a large margin are looking for professionals who have a combination of Hadoop and Java skills. That’s not too surprising given that Hadoop is a Java-based framework, the report states.  

Professionals with Hadoop and NoSQL experience also are in high demand, so much so that they are pulling in more than $100,000 annual salary on average, Dice found.

Other top skills sought by hiring managers in combination with Hadoop were: Developer, Map Reduce, Pig, Linux, Python, Hive and Scala. The search for skills is sure to ...

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If You Want a Job in Tech, Learn to Code

By Brittany Ballenstedt // May 21, 2013

Commencement ceremonies are going on at universities across the country during the month of May, unveiling a new crop of college graduates eager to find their dream jobs. And according to a study released last week, technology and engineering grads should have no trouble finding jobs, right?

That’s not necessarily the case, says Kirk McDonald, president of PubMatic, an ad tech company in Manhattan, in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

“I run a cool, rapidly growing company in the digital field, where the work is interesting and rewarding,” McDonald writes to recent graduates. “But I’ve got to be honest about some unfortunate news: I’m probably not going to hire you.”

It’s not that PubMatic does not have jobs to fill; it’s largely because our nation’s education system has fallen short in grooming graduates with the skills necessary to effectively work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, McDonald writes, citing a potential shortage of roughly 80,000 IT workers over the next decade.

While states and companies should be working together to address this crisis, McDonald encourages current and recent graduates to take matters into their own hands and learn how to ...

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Mobile Strategies Maturing at One-Year Mark

By Brittany Ballenstedt // May 20, 2013

This week marks one year since the White House released its Digital Government Strategy, and more than half of federal IT executives believe the strategy has helped their agencies make progress on implementing mobile IT strategies over the past year, according to a new survey.

The report, released Monday by Mobile Work Exchange and Good Technology, found that 52 percent of 175 federal IT executives surveyed believe their agency’s mobile IT strategy has matured over the last year, with 43 percent giving their agency and “A” or “B” grade for progress on the digital government strategy. 

IT executives also are seeing several benefits to implementing mobile IT, including the ability to communicate with colleagues in different locations (48 percent), employee productivity (47 percent), customer service (33 percent) and availability to constituents (28 percent), the study found.

Still, mobile IT implementation still faces some barriers, particularly security (73 percent) and budgets (60 percent), IT executives noted. Agencies are addressing their security concerns with training, however, with 65 percent saying all employees in their agency take security training related to mobile devices, and 68 percent saying their agency provides written security information on mobile devices to employees. 

With budgets also a ...

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Five Things IT Staff Value More Than Salary

By Brittany Ballenstedt // May 17, 2013

The conversation this week has largely been around the issue of recruiting and retaining highly skilled science and technology professionals in the federal government. And with the federal pay freeze now in its third year, agencies may be interested to know that salary is not really what matters to most IT executives, according to a new study.

InformationWeek’s recent 2013 IT salary study found five items that matter most to IT executives, and all of those areas have nothing to do with compensation.

“While you might think that IT execs’ higher level of satisfaction with compensation might factor in here, digging into the data a little bit tells us a different story,” InformationWeek’s Jonathan Feldman reports.

Among the 340 CIOs surveyed, most put a higher value on aspects of their job other than compensation. The top answers were, in order: my opinion and knowledge are valued; involvement in setting company strategy and determining goals; my work is important to the company’s success; challenge of job/responsibility; and corporate culture and values.

It’s likely that if those five areas matter most to chief information officers, they also matter most to staff, particularly the most confident and employable ...

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Older Posts // May 16, 2013 and earlier