Forget Google or Apple, if you’re an engineering major. A new poll shows that more college students in that field are choosing government agencies as their dream employer over private-sector firms.
Employer branding firm Universum recently polled more than 59,640 undergraduates to find out their ideal employer in specific fields of study, including business, engineering and IT. And no surprise there: Google was once again voted the top employer among business and IT majors. The company also earned a number 5 spot among engineering students and was chosen as a preferred employer by nearly half of those students.
The top employer in engineering, however, was a government agency. NASA was picked by 17 percent in its respective field. The Energy Department was also in the top 10 for engineering majors, placing seventh in that category.
Top 10 engineering:
1. NASA
2. Boeing
3. Lockheed Martin Corporation
4. Google
5. General Electric
6. Apple
7. Energy Department
8. Exxon Mobil Corporation
9. Walt Disney Company
10. BMW
Top 10 IT:
1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Apple
4. Facebook
5. IBM
6. Amazon
7. Intel
8. Electronic Arts
9. Walt Disney Company
10. Sony
The State Department, the FBI and the CIA were popular picks among liberal-arts students, although the Walt Disney Company snagged the top spot.
Top 10 humanities/liberal arts/education:
1. Walt Disney Company
2. United Nations
3. Teach for America
4. Google
5. State Department
6. Apple
7. Peace Corps
8. FBI
9. Central Intelligence Agency
10. American Cancer Society
Posted by Camille Tuutti on May 21, 2012 at 1:57 PM0 comments
A Utah congressman who’s supporting new legislation for federal employees to have more latitude for political activism and participation hasn’t always had feds’ backs.
Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) recently became the lead Republican cosponsor of the Hatch Act Modernization Act, which aims to overhaul the 70-year old legislation that bans executive branch employees, D.C. government employees, and some state and local employees who work with federally funded program from engaging in political activity.
The updated Hatch Act was introduced by Sens. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Joseph Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), and Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-Md), Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), Gerry Connolly (D-Va), James Moran (D-Va.) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). Among other provisions, it would allow government employees to run for elective office, and would give the Merit Systems Protection Board more flexibility in setting the punishment for employees who violate the Hacth Act.
Chaffetz said the new legislation is “simple, fair, and essential to ensure that actions taken against public employees engaging in political activities are not unjust.”
Chaffetz hasn’t exactly been a friend of the government workforce in the past. He previously rallied for a smaller federal workforce and bringing federal compensation to be more in line with private industry, meaning lower pay.
“Bloated salary and benefit packages, in addition to draining scarce resources, may limit the growth and mobility of employees while reducing the inflow of young, energetic workers at the lower end of the salary scale,” he wrote in an April 2 op-ed. He also suggested firing feds who were late on their federal tax obligations.
“Most federal employees take their tax obligations seriously,” he wrote in the op-ed. “But those who are unwilling to play by the rules should not be entitled to the privileges of federal employment."
Posted by Camille Tuutti on May 18, 2012 at 2:32 PM1 comments
It’s no secret the federal government has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on failed IT projects over the past decade, prompting former U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra in 2010 to come up with a plan to address what he called “systemic problems” and reform federal IT management.
Two years later and with a new federal CIO Steven VanRoekel at the helm, several milestones in Kundra’s 25-point plan have been met, including directives known as “the firsts.” Those “firsts” – cloud first, shared first and future first – have now provided inspiration to new guidelines for federal CIOs as outlined by Evan McDonnell, vice president of solutions at Appian, in his new white paper “Adapting to the New Information Technology Directives: A Guide for Federal Government CIOs.”
Here are some of McDonnell's principles for better federal IT management:
Implement “business-ready” technology:
Commercial off-the-shelf applications present a problem when federal CIOs need to make modifications. McDonnell suggests considering business process management platforms that give CIOs the opportunity to tailor applications to their unique needs – for less money and less time.
“As federal CIOs adopt business-ready technology like BPM, business process stakeholders will become less dependent on IT to design and configure processes to create new applications,” McDonnell predicts.
Move to one platform:
Agencies have traditionally bought software from different vendors to get the best application for each need, resulting in multiple systems that don’t always communicate or mesh well with each other. However, if CIOs were to use a single business process management software, they would eliminate the headache of having users log in from various software packages. “Even greater economies of scale are possible if federal CIOs share the core of their applications with other agencies,” McDonnell writes. “Such ‘frameworks’ can be tailored to fit each agency’s specific mission saving substantial development costs.”
Shift to agile:
Agile development has lately emerged as a go-to method to handle IT projects rather than the traditional “waterfall” approach. Not only is the latter approach slow; it relies on procurement officers to detail all known requirements and predict future requirements – an impossible task because users often don’t know what they want until they’ve tried a new technology, McDonnell points out. “As long as the government focuses on COTS products, this problem can never go away,” he writes. “It could go away if the government moved back to custom development with a shift to ‘agile‘ development approaches where applications are built in ‘sprints’ with frequent user feedback.”
McDonnell had several other interesting things to say. You can read the full report here.
Posted by Camille Tuutti on May 16, 2012 at 3:20 PM1 comments
The current fiscal era can be downright scary to all government employees, and budget uncertainty is paralyzing the federal government’s effort to move forward and look for efficiencies, according to a former Agriculture Department official.
“The environment is so unstable that federal managers are afraid to make long-term commitments because of ceilings and spending caps, short-term appropriations and fear of sequestration -- they don’t know which way to turn,” said John Ortego, president of Ortego & Associates and former director of USDA’s National Finance Center.
The inability to predict their own appropriations for the next two years has led to many CIOs and CFOs to go into survival mode, Ortego said.
Ortego and officials from Commerce Department and the Office of Management and Budget participated in a May 10 keynote presentation organized by 1105 Media, the parent company of Federal Computer Week.
The focus of the panel was CFO and CIO perspective on current IT trends that had emerged in the belt-tightening era, and included a discussion on legacy systems and how to determine when to retire them.
Scott Quehl, CFO and assistant secretary of administration at Commerce, acknowledged how his agency in the last two decades had had some major stumbling blocks in the area of systems acquisition.
The agency now has a new acquisition policy that addresses major IT systems acquisitions, Quehl said, and its FY14 budget guidance calls on Commerce bureaus to identify top 50 projects that meet certain thresholds.
The bureaus also have to review whether a siloed approach to risk management makes sense and determine what projects need to be canceled or need more doubling-down in terms of funding, he said.
Posted by Camille Tuutti on May 10, 2012 at 1:10 PM0 comments
A recent survey claimed that although salaries for federal IT pros remained stagnant in past couple of years, government IT workers still earn more than their private-sector counterparts. Readers, however, were ... let's say, skeptical.
“Where I live, I get 16 percent locality pay,” wrote reader Richard. “That is, I get 16 percent more than other IT guys in federal service at my grade. Even at that, my peers in private industry get 15 to 25 percent MORE than I do."
DaleR also questioned the survey methodology and the cohort polled. “Where does this $97,000 figure come from?” he asked. “Nobody in my IT shop makes close to that except the CIO. Poll places outside of D.C. for a real snapshot of what government employees make (IT). Contractors make a lot more than us. It is a fact.”
Lee agreed, pointing to how the D.C. region tends to have higher salaries compared to other parts of the country. “I think they need to take their surveys outside the Washington beltway where the IT specialty pay is a lot less,” Lee commented. “I believe the average fed IT pay is quite a bit less than the $97,000 they quote. It's more like lower $80,000s.”
DT also asked, perhaps rhetorically, perhaps literally, where the salary numbers come from. (The link to the InformationWeek’s survey can be found here. It wasn’t accessible at the time I was blogging about it.)
“I've been in government IT for 25 years, and I don't know anyone making that amount of money except higher management. And I mean very high management. Like the director of all of IT here,” DT said.
Another longtime federal IT professional said that after working 17 years at the Veterans Affairs Department, and being one of the highest-paid IT staff, “I make less than $90,000. Not sure where these people who make $97,000 work, but they must be upper management in the government, not a local IT worker bee."
Taking a more analytical approach to the numbers, Scott pointed out that comparison of salaries between government and industry often focuses just on compensation and don’t consider retirement benefits and automatic time-in-grade promotions.
However, “throw this into the mix with the data presented in this article and one can easily decipher that, for IT, federal employees make a lot more money than their private counterparts,” he said.
Posted by Camille Tuutti on May 07, 2012 at 1:25 PM5 comments
I recently attended an event where I heard someone say CIOs’ days are numbered. It wasn’t really news to me: That whole concept of CIOs, particularly in government, having a short lifespan dates back to oh, forever.
When CIO first emerged on the scene, people weren’t exactly agog. They used to say CIO meant Career Is Over. For government CIOs, that statements holds some truth. While former Justice Department CIO Vance Hitch held his position for nearly a decade, making him the longest-serving CIO in government, the average tenure for CIOs is two years.
The nation’s first U.S. CIO, Vivek Kundra, made it 2.5 years before he threw in the towel and handed over the reins to former Microsoft exec Steven VanRoekel. Others who have passed the two-year marker are VA CIO Roger Baker and DHS CIO Richard Spires, who were both appointed in 2009.
But the notion that CIOs would completely vanish is just rubbish, according to an article on CIO.com. CIOs’ roles and responsibilities may change drastically, but they’ll still be around, the story titled "10 Predictions for What the CIO Role Will Look Like in 2020" points out.
In 2012, CIOs will, for example, not have a traditional IT department. With the march to the cloud and rapid advancements in technology, IT departments will move from being a physical entities that manages cloud services to a cloud service itself, the article notes.
Future CIOs will also see a dip in the number of employees they manage. Instead, the future will usher in more autonomous computing that relies less on human intervention for systems to operate correctly.
To read the rest of the story, head over to CIO.com.
Posted by Camille Tuutti on May 04, 2012 at 1:49 PM0 comments
Federal IT professionals are far from immune to the belt-tightening in government, as evidenced by a new survey by InformationWeek.
Nextgov reports the pay for federal IT workers stagnated, and even decreased, due to the two-year salary freeze for feds. By polling more than 730 federal IT workers, the survey found that the average compensation for federal IT staff had stayed at $97,000. IT managers, on the other hand, saw a slight dip in their total compensation: from 2011’s number of $125,000 to the current level of $120,000.
The survey also pointed out that those government IT professionals are nonetheless earning more than their industry IT colleagues, who average around $90,000. Those in management positions make around $116,000.
However, previous surveys, such as this one, contradicts the notion that federal IT pros are better compensated than those in the commercial sector. Robert Half Technology's Salary Guide from October 2011 showed that a new-found focus on big data, cybersecurity and mobility has fueled IT hiring in the private sector, thus pushing starting salaries higher.
The InformationWeek survey cited in Nextgov polled 480 federal IT staffers and 253 federal IT managers.
Posted by Camille Tuutti on May 02, 2012 at 2:32 PM22 comments