Interested in one of those prestigious Presidential Management Fellowships? A newly launched web site hopes to answer all your questions about the selective program, which offers recent graduate students a paid, two-year stint with a federal agency, followed by the chance for a permanent career. The interactive site is backed by the Robertson Foundation for Government, a nonprofit group that seeks to attract top grad students to federal careers in the foreign policy and national security arenas, and the online social network, GovLoop. The new site offers considerably more material than is available from the official site, including tips and…
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Veterans Affairs Department employees have had access to one of the government’s best career-development tools since October. Soon, you may see something like it coming to your agency. Last week, top VA officials demonstrated the tool — called MyCareer@VA — at a meeting of administration and union leaders. “When you think about your own career, there are times that you want to figure out how to get ahead, but there are also times that you may feel like you’re stuck and want to do something else,” said VA Deputy Secretary Scott Gould as he presented the website July 18 to…
As of this Sunday, the National Security Personnel System is officially defunct. In a Federal Register notice published today, the Office of Personnel Management and the Defense Department report that they are repealing the regulations accompanying the controversial pay-for-performance system effective Jan. 1. The repeal is basically just housekeeping; the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act ended the legal authority for the NSPS and declared that any existing regs would be toast by the beginning of 2012. Should anyone need a refresher on what the very long-running flap was about, incidentally, this Federal Times article offers a good recap.
UPDATED 9:55 a.m.: More than a dozen federal buildings in the Washington area, including the Interior Department’s headquarters on C Street, are closed today following the 5.9- magnitude earthquake that rocked the east coast Tuesday afternoon. “Emergency employees are expected to report for work on time,” regardless of their building being closed, according to an update posted on the Office of Personnel Management’s website, which includes a list of all building closures as of 1:50 a.m. (A list of building closures is also included below). Employees working at buildings that are open will have the option of unscheduled leave and…
The Office of Personnel Management has established a formal career path for information technology program managers and IT project managers, according to a recent memo. In a memo last month, OPM encouragesd agencies to use the new title as soon as possible “to recruit, select and develop a cadre of high-performing IT program managers,” the memo said. Agencies have a year to align their standards with those provided by OPM. Under the administration’s IT reform plan, OPM was charged with designing a career path by this month. According to OPM’s definitions, a program manager is responsible for managing one or…
Attentive (and we mean really attentive) Fedline readers might remember a post from last month about the apparent disconnect of the Office of Personnel Management’s charging the U.S. Postal Service more for its current pension contributions at the same time the Obama administration is proposing a big refund to the Postal Service on past contributions. We’d asked OPM for comment and finally received an answer yesterday. So, in the interest of thoroughness, we’re rerunning the original Feb. 22 post, with the OPM response appended verbatim. Here’s an intriguing nugget from the U.S. Postal Service’s latest quarterly report: Even as the Obama…
Here’s an intriguing nugget from the U.S. Postal Service’s latest quarterly report: Even as the Obama administration agrees that the Postal Service is owed a huge refund on past payments to its pension program, the Office of Personnel Management—headed by Obama appointee John Berry—is requiring it to shell out more for current payments. For the first quarter of fiscal 2011, the Postal Service’s contributions to the Federal Employees Retirement System, or FERS, rose by $24 million—from $1,469 million to $1.493 million—versus the same period in fiscal 2010, even though the USPS workforce continued to shrink, the report says. The reason,…
The Office of Personnel Management is conducting yet another workforce-related survey, this time with the CIO Council. Under the administration’s IT reform plan, OPM is taking the lead on creating a specialized career path for program managers. The survey, in part, will aid OPM in the process and provide strategies “to recruit, retain, develop, and manage a fully trained and qualified IT workforce,” according to information posted on CIO.gov. From Jan. 18 to Feb. 25, all federal civilian information technology workers will have access to the 2011 IT Workforce Capability Assessment via CIO.gov. Results will help agencies: – Identify the…
Top government officials agree that far more cybersecurity professionals are needed to defend the nations networks and solve one of its most pressing issues: hiring and retaining a qualified cyber workforce. But defining exactly what those roles are and what skills are needed is the challenging part. “That’s really the issues,” said Nancy Kichak, associate director of strategic human resource policy at the Office of Personnel Management at the Executive Leadership Conference on Tuesday. “Despite the fact that we all use the terminology cybersecurity, just what does it mean? And how do you definite it, and how do you identify…
The Office of Personnel Management is hosting a series of focus groups to garner solutions for beefing up the government’s cybersecurity workforce. Starting today, OPM called on dozens of cybersecurity professionals and hiring managers to discuss strategies and best pratices for recruiting and retaining highly skilled workers. During the three-hour sessions, participants were given a list of potential solutions and asked to rank them as being the best or worst options for attracting cybersecurity workers. Possible areas of focus include: -Establishing a governmentwide cybersecurity certification process -Mapping a governmentwide cybersecurity career path -Create a new occupation definition, classification, qualification and standards -Invest more in…