A top workforce executive at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said today that the agency is planning to roll out version one of its Federal cyber workforce dashboard in the next month or two.
During NextGov’s March 30 Cyber Defenders digital event, OPM Deputy Associate Director of Strategic Workforce Planning Jason Barke said the new tool will be comprised of two versions – a public version and an agency-specific version – to provide both government employers and employees with data to better address workforce needs.
“We’ve recently developed a cyber workforce dashboard that we’re going to be rolling out,” Barke said.
The first version of the dashboard, he said, will be available “hopefully in the next month or two.”
According to Barke, the first rollout “will be a public facing dashboard so we can all understand what our cyber landscape looks like, help inform the public – and also job seekers – to where our cyber roles are.”
“We’re also [releasing] a more granular one that’s going to be just for agency use so they can really go in and drill down deep and do some benchmarking and some comparisons to understand if their workforce looks like other workforces,” he said.
Barke said that some of the “important trends” the dashboard aims to display are how agencies measure hiring time; if they are hiring efficiently and effectively; if they are losing quality applicants because they cannot hire in a timely manner; what the attrition rate looks like; how attrition impacts the cyber workforce; and where agencies are losing key skills.
“[We] feel that a dashboard like that will be extremely important to be able to use that data,” Barke explained.
“Understanding where these gaps are and being able to monitor those gaps is vital to be able to track progress and make adjustments to where we understand the vulnerabilities are and exist,” he said.
“We see this as another really key piece of this whole workforce planning puzzle that really allows us to get more granular and to really understand what is happening in those certain areas,” Barke said.
“We look forward to really understanding that kind of data, understanding where those hiring gaps are, where those staffing gaps are, and being able to implement strategies, implement plans to close those gaps,” he said.
The dashboards, he said, will allow OPM to “dive in and conduct some root cause analysis to understand why we may not be able to fill gaps, or if we’re having some success in certain areas, what does that look like and how do we manifest that success and share that success across government.”
“Hopefully by being able to track and being able to put in some interventions we’ll be able to close those gaps and make sure we have all the critical staff that we need in the cyber workforce,” Barke said.
