DoD Makes Progress With Cyber Workforce Strategy Implementation
With about one year of Cyber Workforce Strategy implementation under the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) belt, officials shared that the department accomplished about 90% of what it planned for fiscal year 2024.
The DoD first outlined the 38-initiative plan to improve its cyber workforce through identification, recruitment, retention and development in December 2023 and briefed the media on its progress on November 7, 2024. The implementation plan will span from FY 24 to FY 27, and Mark Gorak, the principal director for resources and analysis in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, said he will update the implementation status annually.
Out of the 38 initiatives, the DoD highlighted 10 and met nine of the goals it set to accomplish within the first year of implementing the strategy. In 2024, the DoD established the Cyber Academic Engagement Office, utilized talent exchange programs, integrated cyber operation scenarios in training exercises and decreased the civilian workforce time to hire to 79 days, according to the implementation plan documents.
The department was not able to establish a dedicated fund for the cyber workforce, and Gorak said this likely won’t happen until FY 27. The eventual goal is to use the fund to hire interns for training and potential employment and to create a centralized training program to ensure employee readiness.
Gorak said the DoD’s biggest accomplishment is reducing the civilian vacancy rate by 4.8% to a rate of 16.2% when the original goal was to decrease this metric by 2%. In 2024, the DoD made 14,000 civilian hires and lost about 6,000 of them.
“If we add our military in, our average is about 10,000 cyber experts, which the Department of Defense turns over to the nation to support other efforts, whether in industry or within the federal government, to help us with our cybersecurity needs,” Gorak said, according to the official transcript from the media briefing call.
Despite the improvement in new civilian hires over the past year, Gorak said the DoD has a long way to go. He estimates the cyber workforce shortage to be about 28,000 civilian and military employees.
“There's good turnover and there's not good turnover, if you will,” Gorak said. “So, you have to really segment out the qualifications of that workforce and then go after the highly qualified workforce. And we have the tools, the authorities to do that. It's a matter of how do we measure that? How do we know? And then how do we incentivize and target only the top performers or the top highly qualified workforce that we want?”
For FY 25, Gorak said two of the biggest initiatives will be to strengthen the DoD’s qualification program for new hires with cybersecurity backgrounds and to develop a skills-based assessment.
