Facing a shortage in the cybersecurity workforce, the state of California is trying to get creative in its hiring and retention of these highly skilled and sought-after workers.
It's a multipronged effort that the state's IT chief hopes will put the state in the competition.
"We're somewhat in a disadvantaged state in competing with the private sector in hiring this workforce," California Department of Technology (CDT) Director Amy Tong told lawmakers at a legislative hearing last month.
The strategy involves outreach to K-12 schools, specialized training of employees and encouraging workers who leave a state job to think about coming back in the future.
Recruiting students to the workforce is key, state officials and educators say. And community colleges and universities in California have developed cybersecurity courses and joined with the private sector to offer training and certificates intended to meet the growing job demand. There's also a recognition that young kids should be targeted and shown the world of IT beyond the classroom.
As part of those efforts, California State University, Sacramento, joined CDT, the California Office of Emergency Services, the California Military Department, and the California Highway Patrol to host a Cybersecurity Education Summit last month, where high school and college students were invited to participate.
"We want to start them young," Tong said. "When they come into these forums like this, they can get a real exposure."
The Department of Technology is also focusing on its own employees — offering myriad training intended to help them learn new innovations and further their own careers in technology. The recent cybereducation summit, for example, would have given an attendee eight educational credits.
It also runs two so-called academies intended to provide in-depth training and career development open to all state IT employees: the seven-month Information Technology Leadership Academy and the 11-week Project Management Leadership Academy. And next year, the department intends to launch a six-month Information Security Academy that Tong says will provide "intense training and hands on experience" in the cybersecurity arena.
In some cases, recruiting future employees is actually embracing those who want to leave state government and encouraging them to think about coming back sometime in the future. It's a recognition, Tong says, that the younger workforce wants to move on but could come back with all they've learned from the private sector and benefit the state someday.
"We help map a career path for them," said Tong. "It's not about sitting about in one place."
Even with professional development and generous state benefits, the pay for state jobs can be much lower than in the private sector. And private companies are aggressively courting college graduates.
Take, for example, the story Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, told colleagues about her own son, who is working on a master's degree in computer science. Two semesters before his graduation, he received two job offers from two large tech companies. About a month ago, he received an unsolicited 10 percent raise before he had even started his job.
"That's what we're up against," Irwin said.
The market demand for information security analysts is certainly high, with the unemployment rate at 2 percent nationwide in that sector over the last few years, said Hans Johnson, director of the Higher Education Center at the Public Policy Institute of California. And employers are rewarding applicants who have bachelor's degrees with higher wages — 70 percent higher than someone who has an associate's degree or some college. A person with an associate's degree can earn 20 percent more than someone with a high school degree.
"Those are all signs of strong labor market demand and employers having difficulty finding people," Johnson said.
In California state government, about 11,000 of the state's 214,000 positions are in the IT field — about 5.3 percent of all state jobs, according to the California Department of Human Resources (CalHR). And of those jobs, 13 percent remain vacant, a rate similar to California's overall vacancy in IT jobs, CalHR Director Richard Gillihan said.
In an effort to help potential job applicants find the right IT jobs, CalHR is proposing to overhaul how the state classifies some 40 IT job classifications, part of the Brown administration's Civil Service Improvement Initiative.
"Our current classifications' structure is confusing and doesn't map to private-sector job functions," Gillihan said. "Most were developed a few decades ago, and the IT sector has evolved rapidly in that time."
If approved next month by the state Personnel Board, future job applicants should have a simpler time finding and understanding open IT jobs, Gillihan said, with just nine classifications for the entire state workforce that CDT officials hope will lead to more jobs being filled.
