OPM to rate agencies' IT training
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The Office of Personnel Management tells agencies it will start tracking their success training IT employees.
The Office of Personnel Management will use its Human Capital Scorecard to start tracking agencies' success in training IT employees.
'IT training plays a significant role in creating and maintaining a high-quality workforce,' OPM director Kay Coles James said.
She recently sent a memo to agency executives outlining the agency's new IT training guidance and its plan to rate agencies' training efforts. These reflect OPM's effort to fulfill mandates under the E-Government Act of 2002.
In the memo, James said OPM will work with the CIO Council to include IT training in its review of overall agency human capital programs and strategies. Part of that is the inclusion in the Human Capital Scorecard, which OPM started in 2001 to help agencies obtain a green rating for the President's Management Agenda.
The OPM scorecard focuses on five dimensions of human capital: strategic alignment, strategic competencies, leadership, performance culture and learning.
In 2001, the agency created specific performance goals and measures for each of the five dimensions. It also provided operational guidance. The scorecard results let OPM view progress over time and provide comparisons against governmentwide averages and private-sector benchmarks, James has said.
In her recent memo, James also reminded agencies to use the IT roadmap on GoLearn.gov that the CIO Council developed to assess employees' competencies and identify skill gaps [See GCN story].
She also directed agencies to use OPM's Guide to Strategically Planning Training and Measuring Results to develop agency and program-specific training performance standards and strategies.
The Government Accountability Office's Guide to Assessing Strategic Training and Development Efforts is another useful reference, James said.
This is the second IT training memo OPM has issued in six months. In July, OPM and the CIO Council issued one on how agencies can improve their core IT competencies [See GCN story].
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