The Pentagon’s push to strengthen its cybersecurity workforce is gaining momentum, with the time it takes to onboard a new civilian employee now dropping below 80 days, a senior official told reporters last week.
“We have 79 days average time-to-hire in our civilian workforce,” Mark Gorak, principal director for resources and analysis within the DoD’s office of the chief information officer, said during a discussion with reporters on Nov. 7.
In February 2023, the department published its Cyber Workforce Strategy, followed by an implementation plan later that year, to spell out its goals for the cyber workforce.
Reducing time-to-hire is just one of the objectives in that plan, and according to Gorak, it’s an area where the department is seeing early success.
“If we include our special hiring authorities under Cyber Excepted Service, which is a Title 10 authority, that comes down to about 73 days’ time-to-hire, which beats the requirements of Office of Management and Budget, and that’s well below the DoD average. So, we’re doing much better in our hiring, reducing that time,” Gorak said.
In 2024, vacancies in the DoD cyber workforce have gone down by 4.8 percent, he further explained, demonstrating success in retention of cyber talent.
“The civilian vacancy rate is now down to 16.2 percent, that is a 4.8 percent decrease from last year,” Gorak said. “In order to get there, believe it or not, we had to hire about 14,000 additional civilians.”
Gorak acknowledged that the department lost approximately 10,000 civilian and military cyber personnel, but the net gain from the new hires meant the vacancy rate went down in the DoD cyber workforce.
Additionally, Gorak explained that the department has seen growth of the cyber talent exchange program.
“We have exchange programs within the DoD. We have it with industry, and we have it with our Federal partners … We have expanded that program with some of our industry partners, including seven additional new industry partners,” Gorak said, adding that among those new partners are small and large technology-based organizations.
