Technology Talent Staffing
Workforces with a healthy ratio of technical to non-technical talent can react to innovation opportunities more quickly and effectively while performing mission critical upkeep and collaboration duties.
Key Insights
Six out of the ten environmentally-centered bureaus have increased both the ratio of tech to non-tech talent and the percentage of technical talent in their workforces since 2013. However, their average growth has leveled out over the last 4 years.
The four agencies with declining rates have begun to level off in the last four years, relative to the preceding 4-year slices. However, some of that stabilization may be a factor of reaching their lower limits of sustainable technical talent. For example, over this span the USDA has consolidated much of their technical talent into a centralized IT shop, moving it away from the bureaus that rely on it.
-
Driving innovation with data and technology is less about the technical systems than it is about the people building and maintaining them. Agencies’ ability to recruit and retain tech talent has a direct impact on their capacity to conceive, develop, and implement innovative technology projects for mission support and delivery. We consider tech talent levels as both a percentage of total workforce and as a ratio relative to other employees.
-
Taken together, these measures represent a significant part of the organization’s capacity for staff-driven technological innovation. Higher percentages of technology talent within a workforce create more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration between:
Technical subject matter experts and procurement officers to improve the quality and impact of purchased tools.
Technologists and mission domain experts to brainstorm solutions and co-create tools.
More fundamentally, environmental agencies need to increase their proportion of technical staff to maintain and upgrade technology systems in order to recover from technical debt. Technical debt degrades the efficiency and quality of an agency’s mission activities and services. Moreover, it stifles innovation by making it harder to adopt new technologies and driving away top-tier technical talent.
Tech Talent Percentage of Total Workforce and Tech Ratio to Non-Technical Employees
Takeaways and Next Steps
Deterioration of tech talent within the workforce can easily become a self reinforcing cycle. This pattern is shown in the data for NRCS and BLM, agencies that have seen a steady decline in both metrics, leading to vanishingly low proportions of technical talent. The lack of necessary talent will increasingly defer system upgrades and maintenance. Broken systems, outdated codebases, and skeleton crewed IT shops make it significantly more difficult to hire and retain new technical talent. NOAA may prove an exception to this rule, where an extraordinarily healthy tech talent ecosystem has declined precipitously, but still maintains the strongest ratio and percentage of all ten bureaus by a notable margin. This serves as a good reminder that hiring rate metrics are one indicator among many. Organizations that score highly on this indicator are better prepared to experiment and innovate because their tech ecosystem is healthy enough to evolve. Those who score lower have less flexibility and capacity to explore novel technical solutions. Lower scoring agencies should consider:
Leveraging technology fellowships (PIFs, USDC) and IPAs to bolster team capacity and discover long-term talent.
Engaging with Digital Service teams in and out of government to augment your workforce and explore what’s possible.
Taking advantage of expanded hiring authorities to bring in the necessary talent for the long-term.
Methodology →
-
Last data pull: March 2024
Data vintage: March 2013 - March 2024
-
-
We define technical talent as the IT specialist designation, which includes the following job series: computer scientists (1550), IT technology management (2210), operations research (1515), and computer engineering (0853).