Three Federal chief information officers (CIO) said this week that the current surge of interest in AI technologies presents an opportunity for the Federal government to reform its hiring processes to meet demand for a larger AI workforce.
Gundeep Ahluwahlia, CIO at the Department of Labor (DoL), said during a NAPA webinar on April 29 that AI is forcing the government to “revisit the way we do business” – starting with the Federal hiring process.
“Maybe the first step is reforming [position descriptions] PDs and classifying them, but I think this is an opportunity for us to reform hiring,” Ahluwahlia said. “It is so hard for me to get people to go and get excited about applying for jobs on usajobs.gov. And then only to realize that you have to wait for two months or three months, and then the government doesn’t even get back. There is an automated message that comes back.”
“So, I think the whole process – this is an opportunity for us to maybe ask do we need PDs the way we do PDs,” he said.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced this week that it is overhauling the Federal government’s hiring process for the IT management job series to have a skills-based hiring approach. OPM also announced the same day that it issued new guidance for skills-based hiring in AI-related roles.
OPM CIO Guy Cavallo said he’s hoping his agency can lead the way in classifying AI roles for the Federal government.
“I can tell you today on USAJobs, if you were able to do a search and look for AI, it’s probably on 50 to 100 different job categories,” Cavallo said. “Is a chief AI officer a data scientist, or is it a business analyst? It’s a classification that nobody has right now. So, I’m hoping that we can help lead the way.”
“I’m hoping that we can help improve those standardized position descriptions across government so that we’re all not reinventing the wheel,” he added.
The Trump-era AI in Government Act tasked OPM with establishing an occupational series to include AI-focused jobs, something lawmakers have chided the agency for being nearly three years late on.
Regardless, Cavallo highlighted that agencies still need to be focused on AI training.
“You need to take care of your own workforce, make sure that they’re prepared. There will be new jobs, new job categories that we’ll need to hire for, but you also want to take care of those that are on board now,” he said. “It’s not something you can just dump on somebody’s desk, and all of a sudden they’re going to master AI.”
Cavallo said that even though OPM is currently blocking its workforce from using AI while the agency finalizes governance for the tool, he is offering 15-20 AI training courses to his employees for free.
Gary Washington, CIO at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), said that his agency is focused on attracting the workforce of the future.
“We need to reform [hiring] and work towards attracting the workforce that we really want. Because, admittedly, some of our workforces are close to retirement. And we need to start thinking about the IT workforce of the future and start attracting this new talent,” Washington said. “We need to think about, if we develop these PDs, what are we trying to attract?”
Washington said that AI will allow the agencies’ customers to play a more active role in the Federal government.
Currently, he said USDA is using AI tools for “low risk activities,” like those in HR and finance, but as the agency matures its governance, it will expand its use.
