CIO Council asks feds to weigh in on IT workforce recommendations

The federal Chief Information Officers Council wants to hear what government workers have to say about several proposals to change the way information technology workers are hired and paid, members of the council said at a press briefing Tuesday. To make it easy for workers to share their views, the council has posted a study of the IT workforce on its Web site along with an online form for comments. The study, prepared by the National Academy of Public Administration and titled "The Transforming Power of Information Technology: Making the Federal Government an Employer of Choice for IT Employees," was released last September. It recommends that the government create an alternative pay system for technology workers to help address recruitment and retention needs. It also recommends that IT pay be tied to performance. "Our real goal is not to do a whole lot more studying and analyzing, but to refine the information already compiled," said Fred Thompson, an assistant director for customer service at the Treasury Department who is consulting in the CIO office. "We want people to read it for themselves, draw their own conclusions and express their views." According to statistics from the Commerce Department, more than half of the government's 62,000-person IT workforce will retire in the next five years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the federal government will need an additional 16,000 IT workers in the next 10 years. Recruiting new IT workers has been a hassle for the federal government because of its inability to match private sector salaries or to hire new staff quickly. Currently, government technology workers are paid about half what workers can earn at private firms. Ira Hobbs, acting CIO at the Agriculture Department and co-chair of the CIO Council's Federal IT Workforce Committee, said changes in compensation alone would not solve the federal government's problems. "There are many aspects to the problem, [such as] education and awareness, training and development," Hobbs said. "We want to make sure that we are laying down the proper trails, planting the proper seeds." The Council endorsed NAPA's study earlier this month, describing it as "comprehensive, fair and balanced." "We believe a number of different planned and proposed [pieces of] legislation will include recommendations from this study," said Hobbs. "We just want the people who potentially will be impacted by this study - including those on the state and local level who suffer from the same problems that we do - we want them to read the study and get their feedback."