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US Gov Removing Four-Year-Degree Requirements for Cyber Jobs
- bell-cot 2y ago> The US government this week announced the removal of “unnecessary degree requirements” in favor of skills-based hiring as part of an aggressive push to fill half-a-million open cybersecurity jobs. > The ‘Serve for America’ initiative, announced by National Cyber Director Harry Coker, removes the four-year degree requirement in federal IT contracts and will push agencies to hire based on experience, certifications, and aptitude tests. I'd guess that only a tiny fraction of the (claimed) half-a-million cybersec openings are under direct Federal control. Vs. contractors, state agencies, etc. - all of which may have their own "4 year degrees" requirements, whether formally or informally. Anyone familiar with this space?
- sybercecurity 2y agoA little - The requirements for federal government were put out a long time ago (some scientific role job descriptions date from the 80's). This prevented a lot of new grads who had degrees in fields that didn't exist in the 20th century to get denied or delayed as someone hired to be a sysadmin, or cyber analysis didn't have the correct number of math courses. Basically only a CS degree counted. Don't know about state/local governments, but the ones I have heard about were all over the place: some just copied the federal rules, some just hired whoever they could find. I would guess the beltway bandits will eventually change their requirements to match the federal gov't. They are already a little more lax in some areas (like the number of math courses). They really just want to say "our people meet your qualifications".
- dwater 2y agoFederal contracts have staffing requirements, so the government does hand down education and experience requirements that the contractors must meet when staffing. If you search jobs at federal contractors they often state the position requirements from the government, it's common to see things like "Requires bachelors degree with 10 years relevant experience or 6 years with masters degree", which come straight from the government.
- TZubiri 2y agoI'd imagine it trickles down.
- dotancohen 2y agoAlright, then, what should I be studying in my free time to qualify? I'm already hitting a career ceiling and a midlife crisis, this might really interest me.
- you_should_die 2y ago[flagged]
- globalnode 2y agoContact a recruiter and ask, maybe you could even get an apprenticeship / on the job training. I always thought the book "Code" by Charles Petzold was gold for new people to the industry.
- culopatin 2y agoHas a recruiter ever known anything about a job they list? 0 times in my life
- hoofhearted 2y agoNot in any particular order: Java, Spring Boot, Angular 1 & 2, React, CSS design tokens like Tailwind or Bootstrap, Oracle DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS and AWS Gov Cloud, Amazon SQS, Kubernetes, Rancher, New Relic, GitHub and GitHub Actions, Service Now, Confluence, Jira, and so on. Study up and understand AGILE workflows, and a 2 week 10 business day sprint working cycles. Then tie that back into continuous integration/continuous deployments mentioned above. If you get a grasp of everything I mentioned above and build out your LinkedIn and resume with all of those skills, multiple recruiters will be in your inbox on a daily basis.
- dotancohen 2y agoThank you, I've already got a portion of that under my belt. Getting to work now...
- ninininino 2y ago
- notepad0x90 2y agoI thought this was already the case under the "exempted service" thingy? Or maybe that is only for military? US Cyber Command is a thing too for those unaware.
- alephnerd 2y agoCyberCom is different. This is for civilian hiring via GSA DoD (and a couple other agencies like the SEC) have their own talent and hiring pipeline, as well as their own pay schedules.
- Jcampuzano2 2y agoI always thought the big elephant in the room for public vs private sector, especially the case for IT sector was the compensation leading to not being able to attract the best talent. That is - regardless of people who already have 4 year degrees or not, in the private sector both categories of people who are already established and accomplished would have much more earning power. Has this changed recently? If not I still think most of the best talent would be going to private sector. Sure with the recent amount of layoffs and what I've heard people saying is a general reduction in earnings for software devs and IT positions some people are looking for basically anything. While those are great people, the people doing the most impactful work likely weren't laid off in the first place in the majority of companies.
- TZubiri 2y agoGovernment can still hire contractors or products from the private sector no?
- datavirtue 2y agoYes, but it is extremely budget constrained and there are a few companies who tune their business to this type of work. It's brutal. If you need clearanced engineers the price goes through the roof.
- Retric 2y agoGovernment pays IT fairly well compared to 95% of all IT jobs. It’s not paying FAANG wages, but more time off, less overtime, and pensions make direct salary comparisons misleading. Honestly if I was starting over as a fresh graduate I’d probably try and get a government job. Job security makes a huge difference in lifetime earnings and several of my early jobs sucked.
- tallowen 2y agoThe current salary cap for any programmer (or any non executive level roll) that is a federal employee is currently $191,900. I’m glad the hiring requirements are being updated but I’m concerned that making the lower bands easier to join without competitively hiring more senior people will make the federal workforce less effective.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoI don't think it's possible to make the federal workforce less efficient.
- sebstefan 2y agoHave you ever worked a regular office job in the private sector? It's not exactly better either
- datavirtue 2y agoI would say it's far better in the private sector, but the bar is low.
- stvltvs 2y agoI've worked both and, anecdotally, I didn't notice a real difference in efficiency. Public sector was plodding and methodical; private sector was faster but thrashed around wasting energy on the latest Top Priority project. Lots more tech debt in the private sector too. Speed isn't always efficient.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoMethodical to their own ends without having to produce anything that even one member of the public wants, compared to thrashing around wasting energy on the latest Top Priority project that still has to actually make someone want to buy it. There is no comparison. Being methodical is not a value in and of itself, a serial killer can be methodical, that does not make them better than a plumber who is not particularly methodical.
- _ache_ 2y agoWill it be the occasion to lower the price developers in the public sector ? Or is it already too cheap ?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- greenhearth 2y agoWhy not pay for their education instead of eliminating requirements? "Degree is not required" seems like a lowering of the bar more than anything.
- lotsoweiners 2y agoOne costs money and one is free. Not really a tough decision. They probably have at least some sort of tuition reimbursement program as well.
- drivingmenuts 2y agoHow many times can you use the word "cyber" in a news item before it becomes silly-sounding?
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoThis can be problematic in software engineering and real engineering roles. I've worked at shops where they overpaid people but hired folks who didn't have CS degrees so they didn't understand time-space tradeoffs, algorithms, data structures, or how anything worked under the hood... they were just there to collect paychecks, lacked curiosity and pride for the craft, and went home.