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. Out of 2,406 open innovation and technology job listings in September and October of 2024, only 98 are dedicated to IT specialists, implying that technology responsibilities are being shifted onto research and science staff.

  2. NOAA and USACE have the most job listings dedicated to highly innovative roles and are focusing those hires on accelerating and improving environmental program delivery.

  • Agencies have more methods than ever for bringing on technical talent, and they need them. 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.

  • 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. The pace of technological development requires organizations to consistently add new tools to their proverbial belts. Agencies must bring in top-tier technologists, user researchers, scientists, and associated support staff to realize the opportunities innovation affords.

IT Specialists Only Appear in a Single Agency’s Top-5 Job Codes by Listing Count

* Of the series we count as IT Specialists this was the only one to appear in the top 5 of any agency.

Most Environmental Agencies are Underhiring IT Specialists

*Compares Actual IT Specialist job listings posted by each agency in the time period vs the Expected number of those postings relative to their total number of hiring actions and sister agency averages.

Takeaways and Next Steps

While workforce data tells us where an organization is, hiring data tells us where they are going. In September and October of 2024 we found only 98 open listings for IT specialists at environmental agencies (4% of all innovation-oriented hiring actions over this span). NOAA and USACE account for over half of all IT specialist listings (58/98) as well as highly innovative listings (26/48). It’s not surprising that the agencies with robust tech talent ecosystems are also those posting the most innovative and technologically advanced hiring notices. Not surprising, perhaps, but it is concerning for those agencies in danger of falling further behind the curve. As we noted earlier, the longer an organization goes without making meaningful advances in technology talent, the more difficult it is to pull themselves out of technical debt. Harnessing the power of novel technologies like artificial intelligence or quantum computing requires hiring people who have those skills. 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. Fortunately, there are many ways to take a first step. Agencies can prepare themselves for growth by hiring for innovation and technology enabling skillsets. Agencies that want to improve their standing on hiring metrics should consider:

Methodology →

    • Last data pull: October 28th, 2024

    • Data vintage: September 10th, 2024 - October 28th, 2024

  • USA Jobs search API

  • We scored each listing on a 1-10 scale using sentiment analysis to determine how innovative the job was. Highly innovative listings are those that scored over a five.

  • All of: computer scientists (1550), IT technology management (2210), operations research (1515), and computer engineering (0853).

  • We pulled jobs using one of 7 keywords or their synonyms. Data, Technology, Software, Programming, Product, Steward, and Innovation.