Technology Talent Staffing
Workforces with a healthy ratio of technical to non-technical talent can react to innovation opportunities more quickly and effectively while performing mission-critical upkeep and collaboration functions.
Key Insights
Six out of the ten environmentally-centered agencies have increased the percentage of technical talent in their workforces since 2013, with growth leveling out over the last 4 years.
The four agencies with declining rates are stabilizing at dangerously low levels of tech talent staffing.
Field agencies across government, but particularly environmental Field agencies employ extremely low levels of technological talent.
From 2013-2024 - a period of immense technological evolution - the percentage of technologists in the federal environmental workforce is dropping, even as it rises in government overall.
The Bureau of Reclamation is the only environmental Field agency that beats the overall average. Studying why and how may help other Field agencies better balance their workforce skillsets.
*OPM most recently updated these data in March 2024. Third party data suggest that reductions to environmental, scientific, and technological jobs have been – and will be – significant. We will update these insights when those changes are reflected in official numbers.
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Agencies’ ability to recruit and retain tech talent has a direct impact on their capacity to procure, develop, and implement innovative projects for mission support and delivery. Technologists’ domain knowledge is key to building or procuring the right tools at the right prices and scales—and they bring a host of creative and project management skills that complement the policy and domain expertise supplied by traditional civil servants. Tech capacity is just as much about people—their skillsets and workforce needs—as it is about the tools they build or use: including how and where they work (unit silos, interdisciplinary teaming, cross-agency collaboration) and the many resource or process constraints that shape that work (policy, budget, legacy IT). In the face of environmental uncertainty, in-house technologists can also respond to unforeseen opportunities while managing technological hype to ensure that the best (and only the best) strategies or tools are presented to decision-makers.
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Higher percentages of technology talent within a workforce create more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration between:
Technical subject matter experts and procurement officers to improve the quality and impact of purchased tools.
Technologists and mission domain experts to brainstorm solutions and co-create tools.
More fundamentally, environmental agencies need to increase their proportion of technical staff to maintain and upgrade technology systems in order to recover from technical debt. Technical debt degrades the efficiency and quality of an agency’s mission activities and services. It also stifles innovation by making it harder to adopt new technologies and driving away top-tier technical talent. Loading technology skills onto programmatic staff ad hoc instead of hiring IT specialists leaves systems and programs in a messy middle where the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Tech Talent Percentage of Total Workforce*
*OPM most recently updated these data in March 2024. Early data suggest that reductions to environmental, scientific, and technological jobs have been – and will be – significant. The best current picture of executive policy impacts on the workforce can be seen in the Hiring Indicator.
The Why
Organizations that score highly on this indicator are better prepared to experiment and innovate because their team is ready to evolve alongside technology itself. Those who score lower have less flexibility and capacity to explore novel solutions. Environmental agencies need a robust, internal technical workforce to:
Focus on technical skillsets specialized for environmental work like geospatial data engineering and analysis.
Invest technologists with the domain expertise necessary to ease communication and improve process efficiency around specialized environmental and scientific topics.
The How
Leverage technology fellowships (PIFs Coding it Forward), and IPAs to bolster team capacity and nurture long-term impacts and public service-focused talent pipelines.
Engage with Digital Service teams to augment your workforce and explore what’s possible.
Where possible, take advantage of expanded hiring authorities and tech talent pipelines to bring in the necessary talent for the long-term.