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Hiring for Key Technical Skill Sets

Increasing the share of roles focused on innovative technologies and practices is critical to finding novel solutions that accelerate environmental outcomes.

Key Insights

  1. In a dataset biased for STEM roles, only 4% of hiring actions were dedicated to IT Specialists. 

  2. NOAA and USACE account for over 50% of all IT Specialist hiring actions among environmental agencies.

  3. 5/6 benchmark agencies have IT Specialists in their hiring top-5, all together they occupy six of the top eight rankings for overall tech hiring.

  4. In contrast to staffing, benchmark Field agencies show very strong hiring trends for technology talent, further highlighting the lag in environmental Field agencies.

  5. There is only one environmental agency offering salaries at or above $110,242 – the average IT Specialist salary in our data – and does so with only 3 openings.

  • Using ChatGPT, we built a keyword scraper for USAJobs to pull job listings with technology and innovation responsibilities at environmental agencies. From this dataset, we assessed the extent to which agencies are hiring for technical specialists versus packing technical responsibilities into other science and innovation roles. We also employed natural language processing to understand which agencies are listing roles that require highly innovative and technical skillsets. We found that most agencies have reduced technology specialist hiring actions in favor of science and engineering hires that dual-hat with technology skills. Further, in our most recent data pull (3/25/2025), we found that – even with the addition of six benchmark agencies – overall hiring actions have been reduced by roughly half compared to data pull in October of 2024. This likely reflects the new administration’s insistence on workforce reduction across the federal government.

  • Job announcements provide a strategic snapshot of the skills and projects agencies are focused on. By analyzing position descriptions, we can draw conclusions about the number, type, and seniority level of the technologists agencies are pursuing. The extent to which agencies title and phrase these jobs similarly to the private sector can also have a significant impact on the relevancy of applications received. All of those factors help us understand how much an agency prioritizes technological innovation, and how well they understand who they need to pursue it. We found very few listings for the kinds of specialized technology talent necessary to advance environmental IT infrastructures towards contemporary excellence. The pace of technological development requires organizations to consistently add new tools to their proverbial belts. Agencies must bring in top-tier technologists, as well as the many adjacent roles that make up interdisciplinary teams capable of meeting agencies’ complex mission and innovation needs—including user researchers, designers, customer experience (CX) and content strategists, data scientists, policy SMEs, and associated support staff.

Only One Environmental Agency has IT Specialists Among Their 5 Most-Sought Roles

The Why

Technologists with contemporary skills are an investment in the design, deployment, and management of advanced technological systems. Those systems are urgently needed to meaningfully accelerate progress on environmental missions. We can’t learn more about the potential environmental benefits of artificial intelligence or quantum computing without experimentation by qualified technologists. Hiring new technologists is critical to:

  • Cycle the latest and greatest skills, technologies, and methodologies into government.

  • Apply fresh eyes to longstanding, systemic challenges.

The How