Clinton asks for continual funding of IT study
The Clinton administration has asked Congress to permanently fund a governmentwide study of federal information technology workers pay and position to serve as a reference for future initiatives
The Clinton administration has asked Congress to permanently fund a governmentwide
study of federal information technology workers pay and position so that
to serve as a reference for future initiatives.
The Office of Personnel Management plans to complete its first IT occupational
study this year to determine the differences between the pay scales for
federal IT workers and their counterparts in the private sector.
OPM will use the study to validate the IT job profile model that describes
specific qualifications such as strategic thinking and computer languages,
required by employees in the GS-334 computer specialist and GS-391 telecommunications
series of jobs.
The information can support numerous initiatives and projects, including
the President's Federal Cyber Service initiative, which aims to expand the
number of information security professionals in government, said Mark Montgomery,
director of transnational threats at the National Security Council, speaking
this week at the National Colloquium for Information System Security Education.
The Clinton administration wants to provide OPM with $1 million annually
to conduct the study every two years. "It is our commitment to help OPM
find continual funding for that," Montgomery said.
The study requires a lot of time, and the IT arena changes so fast that
OPM should continually work on the study instead of waiting several years
before starting a new study, he said. With the position and salaries of
IT workers, that would put the federal government two to three years behind
the budget cycle, he said.
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