Intelligence agencies are attracting new talent, but do they have the career development systems to keep them?

While the federal government has harbored a decades-long concern about recruiting more young talent, some intelligence agencies are balancing a more nuanced, if still competitive, human capital battle. 

“The quality of new talent that we are getting is phenomenal,” said Kimberly King, career service manager for analysis within the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of Human Resources. “We’ve got more talent than we can possibly onboard. And they come in such interesting backgrounds already, having done the internships, having done cross-disciplinary programs, speaking a language, doing engineering plus math, it’s phenomenal.”

But, like the rest of government, while the IC can attract talent with the draw of incredible mission, it still has the challenge of retaining them in an environment where agencies are competing with a higher-paying private sector for highly sought-after skills. 

Speaking at a second Intelligence and National Security Foundation webinar Monday focused on the development of the intelligence community’s workforce, King and former Defense Department chief information officer John Sherman, now dean of The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, said that the IC must also evolve its career development practices to ensure it can capitalize on today’s talent environment. 

“If your career development feels like it’s from the 1990s, it probably is,” said Sherman. “And by that, I mean there’s career services and a lot of thoughtfulness being put across the agencies into this, but it still feels very government. And I think from a generation that is super creative, if they are going to experience inflexibility, yes, they’ll do the mission…but the highly laddered, structured, ‘because we said so,’ and ‘this is what you must do to get from pay band four to pay band five,’ it can be suffocating.”

Sherman said that from starting his civilian career as an imagery analyst at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to becoming DOD CIO, he had to “swim against the tide” of an often-inflexible career development bureaucracy, despite having creative and gifted mentors. 

“More often than not, the mid-level was trying to hang on and not allow [change],” he said. “If you feel like that is happening in your agency, that’s going to kill retention as fast as anything, and you will lose them because they are so talented.”

King said DIA has taken steps like rolling out a new pay model to attract college students from certain technical fields to fill science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, roles. That is combined with active recruitment at colleges and universities, encompassing internships, agency open houses and the deployment of career development officers to provide more insight into different careers. 

To help retain and develop the existing workforce, King said that DIA has been active in trying to address things like pay, representation and leveraging data to better understand their trends in attrition and the reason behind it.

The agency is also proactive in upskilling its workforce through joint duty assignments that send employees to temporarily work with other agencies, embedding with private sector partners and in academia. DIA also pays for technical training, senior service schools and offers specialized skills training to earn what King called microbadges. 

Both King and Sherman touted the federal government’s move toward skills-based hiring — which focuses on technical training, certification and competency rather than rigid academic requirements — as a way to bring even more talent to bear.