The Office of Personnel Management is considering revamping the way federal agencies pay, recruit and retain information technology workers.
In a memorandum to personnel directors and the Chief Information Officers Council, OPM last week outlined a new way to evaluate candidates for IT jobs that focuses on skills rather than formal education and years of experience.
The new approach effectively eliminates the current rigid link between years of experience and grade level, thereby giving managers the flexibility to offer better salaries to less experienced, but more technologically savvy job candidates.
Bridging the pay gap between federal IT salaries and the rest of the marketplace has been a major hurdle for agencies trying to keep up with the private-sector in information technology recruitment.
According to a report released by the Chief Information Officers Council in June, the highest entry-level IT pay available in the federal government is about $36,000 per year. In comparison, private industry starting salaries average about $50,000 annually.
The new job profiles, currently in draft form, replace minimum entry-level requirements with general and technical competencies candidates must have at any level.
The descriptions were arrived at after months of research, focus group studies and analysis of governmentwide survey data.
The new profiles would apply to all positions in OPM's computer specialist (GS-0334) and telecommunications (GS-0391) series, both of which will be replaced by a new information technology specialist series at some point in the future.
In the meantime, OPM has proposed 12 new specialty titles to help better describe positions in the 334 and 391 series.
The draft job profiles and specialty titles are open for comment until the end of November and will then be pilot tested at volunteer agencies beginning January 1. The pilot project will only be open to new or vacant positions.
The draft specialty titles are:
- Communications Services: covering voice, data or video communications systems
- Customer Support: covering installation, troubleshooting, user assistance and training
- Data Management: covering acquisition, storage and retrieval of data
- Enterprise: covering policy, strategic, capital and workforce planning
- Information Security: covering confidentiality and reliability of information systems
- Network Services: covering network systems and internet/intranet systems
- Project Management: covering development and management of IT projects
- Software Development: covering new or existing applications or operating systems software
- Systems Administration: covering installation, testing, operation and maintenance
- Systems Analysis: covering planning, analysis and design to meet user needs
- Web Development: covering all aspects of internal and external Web sites
- No Specialty: covering new or rapidly evolving specialty areas not covered elsewhere
OPM's next project is to develop specialty titles and competency requirements for computer scientists and computer engineers (GS-1550 and GS-0850), the memo said.
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