OPM cuts degree requirements for government tech jobs in new standards

The Office of Personnel Management released new classification and qualification standards for technology employees on Monday that make it easier for those without higher education degrees to get government jobs. 

The update is meant to move the government from relying on strict requirements for higher education and years of experience when hiring and promoting workers to using assessments meant to actually test for the skills needed for a given job. 

The new standards for technology employees no longer include degree requirements, an OPM official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Nextgov/FCW. The goal is to make higher education and experience at prior jobs one — but not the only — way to show competency as the government shifts more to relying on testing for actual skills.

“For the first time, your fitness for the job will be determined via a formal assessment rather than based upon whether you have a bachelor’s degree or some minimum amount of work experience,” Scott Kupor, the director of OPM, wrote in a blog about the change.

OPM is now rewriting the standards for all 604 occupational series roles and looking to reduce the number of series, too. The agency aims to move from self-attestation of skills in government hiring to formal assessments to test for aptitude for a given job. 

The new change, years in the making, has bipartisan support, unlike some of the administration’s other revisions to government hiring that have garnered pushback from critics that say that they are politicizing the workforce.

Administrations led by both parties have sought to move the government toward skills-based hiring. The Biden administration announced that the government would be rewiring resume requirements for the government’s IT workforce in 2024, although it was working on this even before then. 

A Trump-era executive order from 2020 directed OPM to review job classifications and qualifications, which set the minimum requirements like educational attainment or years of experience for different types of government jobs. Congress has also passed legislation codifying changes that stress skills over educational attainment.

Technology was a good starting point, the Trump administration said, because of the fast-paced rate of change in the field where the government is wanting to hire up. 

“The move to skills based hiring over time, we think, really does open up many additional possibilities for US citizens who would like to join the federal government to do so,” the OPM official said. “We don't want lack of a specific degree to be an impediment.”

Kupor's blog post cited Edward Coristine — a member of the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency effort who goes by the moniker ‘Big Balls’ — as an example of the opportunities made available by removing degree requirements in his blog about the change.

Before working for the government, Coristine was previously fired from a company, Path Networks, after leaking internal firm secrets to a competitor, Krebs and Bloomberg News have previously reported.

In the media, an existing federal employee objected to Coristine’s place in the government, wrote Kupor, with the “chief complaint” being that “Ed was 19 years old and was a Northwestern University dropout.”

Coristine, who now works at the White House, is a “world-class software developer,” wrote Kupor. “And, if they are in fact world-class engineers, then we should pay them at the level at which they are performing versus force-fitting them into a lower pay level because they have no prior work experience.”