The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity Talent Management System (CTMS) is set to kick off on November 15 with around 150 positions to start with, Angela Bailey, DHS’ chief human capital officer, said Oct. 20 during the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Cybersecurity Summit.
In August, DHS published an interim final rule in the Federal Register detailing CTMS, and the rule is still in the middle of the public comment period. Bailey said DHS has “a little bit of conversations left” with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) regarding CTMS, but it is set to go live on November 15.
Bailey said CTMS will begin with “somewhere around 150 positions,” and then work with CISA to decide the next steps.
CTMS supports what will be known as the DHS Cybersecurity Service, which DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas described on Oct. 20 as “a new approach to Federal hiring and retention that will increase access to public service careers in cybersecurity and modernize our department’s ability to recruit mission-critical cybersecurity talent.”
The CTMS is a result of 2014 legislation in which Congress gave DHS the authority to set up its own personnel system around cybersecurity. However, Bailey said CTMS offers “much more flexibility” than the current General Schedule (GS) classification system.
“Nothing’s going to be predefined from the beginning,” Bailey said. “Naturally, we have to give people some idea what they’re going to do, and we have to give people some idea what we’re going to pay, but it doesn’t have to be so finite.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually this starts to spread out amongst the other Federal agencies, but they too would need the same kind of legislative authority that we received in order to do it,” she said.
