Among State IT Workforce Challenges: The Silver Tsunami, Civil Service Complexities and Tapping Millennial Energy

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The “silver tsunami” retirement wave that many state governments are facing may present great challenges for retaining and recruiting top-notch public sector IT personnel, but there are also opportunities.

But state government IT managers have to flexible and not be stuck looking at human resources through a traditional lens.

Those were among the messages discussed Monday morning during a session on state government IT workforce challenges at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers mid-year conference just outside the nation’s capital.

Jim Smith, the chief information officer for the state of Maine, said “thousands of years of experience is walking out the door” in state government IT shops around the nation.  

NASCIO’s recently released state IT workforce survey underscores the challenges state CIOs are facing with their public sector talent.

According to the NASCIO survey’s executive summary:

• Nearly 92% of states say salary rates and pay grade structures present a challenge in attracting and retaining IT talent.

• 86% of states are having difficulty recruiting new employees to fill vacant IT positions.

• 46% of states report that it is taking 3-5 months to fill senior level IT positions.

• A shortage of qualified candidates for state IT positions is hindering 66% of states from achieving strategic IT initiatives.

• Security is the skill that presents the greatest challenge in attracting and retaining IT employees.

“If we don’t solve it, we’re in serious trouble,” said Carlos Ramos, California’s state chief information officer. “There is no option. We have to solve it.”

The severity of the IT workforce situation varies from state to state.

“We have a third of our workforce eligible to retire in the next five years,” said Tim Robyn, the chief information officer for the state of Missouri.

But Robyn said he doesn’t necessarily view that daunting number as a “crisis” since his office has taken proactive steps to consolidate operations and reduce the personnel headcount, creating a more agile workforce in the process.

While the public sector will normally always be at a disadvantage compared to the private sector when it comes to recruitment, there’s one situation where state governments can be a more attractive place for top IT talent.

Robyn said that when the private sector is hurting in an economic downturn, it can be easier for state governments to recruit top talent. “But when private industry is growing, we can’t compete,” Robyn said.

That’s especially true in California, where the economy has been recovering and the tech sector is growing. So that means that opportunities in Silicon Valley can make it more difficult for state IT leaders like Ramos to not only retain the IT personnel they have, but recruit the people the state government desperately needs.

Ramos said he has a three-part strategy when looking at IT personnel challenges in his state government.

The first is develop the staff that’s already in the workforce, especially those who are younger. That might include training courses in leadership and project management.

The second is to “centralize and leverage the expertise” that exists within state government. That might involve pinpointing state consultants with a “particular expertise and loan them out to different departments.”

The third is to “mature our processes” to help less-experienced workers navigate the complexities of state government.

Maturing processes also extends to the hiring process. Civil service reform was something the panel cited as a critical need for state government as a whole but particularly for state government IT.

Ramos noted that civil service job descriptions for IT positions don’t always align with the actual duties of the job or equivalent roles in the private sector, and that can be a big obstacle for state government IT recruiting and hiring.

Leslie Scott, the executive director of the National Association of State Personnel Executives, echoed the importance of not having a state IT job description sink under the weight of civil service requirements for those descriptions.

“You have to make the job attractive,” she said.

Robyn said that with hiring, the state of Missouri has had success with the implementation of interview panels for jobs. That will often eliminate the risk of having a hiring process be derailed by individuals “who are terrible about hiring people.”

Another critical message panelists stressed: Don’t be afraid of change. In fact, change can be a powerful organizational tool.

“Younger workers are more willing to embrace change. They’re more collaborative,” Robyn said. “We have to embrace the change.”

Robyn said that state government should expect that millennial workers won’t stick around for too long. “They may want to work one year and move on and do something else. They might want to work two years and then do something else.”

But state governments have to capture the altruistic energy that many millennial workers have.

“They want to make a difference,” Ramos said. “We have to embrace that and leverage that in the public sector.”

In Maine, Smith said that in his experience with recruiting younger workers into the state IT workforce, the public sector has to promote the one-of-a-kind services they provide.

State IT hiring managers have to place an emphasis on the only-in-state-government attributes of the position. “You’re going to build applications that you won’t build anywhere else,” Smith said. “If you reflect on it, we do interesting work.”