The Pentagon still needs nearly 30,000 cyber workers, but the number of open positions has gone down significantly since last year, defense officials said Thursday.
“The civilian vacancy rate is now down to 16 percent—that is a 4.8 percent decrease from last year,” Mark Gorak, principal director for resources & analysis, the Pentagon’s office of the chief information officer, told reporters Thursday. “In order to get there, believe it or not, we had to hire about 14,000 additional civilians, and we lost or turned over about 6,000 civilians” to jobs outside the department.
Cyber workers are in high demand across the federal government and in industry, making it difficult for the Pentagon to attract and keep its cyber workforce, which is composed of about 75,000 civilians, 25,000 troops, and 75,000 contractors.
Last year, about 24 percent of DOD cyber jobs were vacant. That vacancy rate dropped to 16 percent, which amounts to about 28,000 unfilled military and civilian cyber roles, Gorak said. Moreover, the Pentagon is still tallying attrition for military cyber workers, but estimates that 4,000 troops left their cyber jobs in 2024.
“We still have a long way to go to get to our closure here, but we’re getting better, and I think that’s one of some of the key metrics of success of this program,” he said.
Money was the top reason cyber workers left their DOD roles, and the Pentagon must increase pay incentives to improve retention, Gorak said.
“We’re addressing that with [cyber excepted service] and target local market supplement,” he said. “I’m also working with [the Office of Personnel Management] and [the Office of Management and Budget] on the levels of pay that were authorized to pay, and the caps that we have within the federal government. So we’re trying to work for cyber and digital to increase those. But again, there’s guard rails and lots of obstacles for us to make that happen.”
In addition to reducing the number of cyber vacancies, the Pentagon named five key initiatives to focus on in 2025: new standards for role qualifications; developing a skills-based assessment for hiring; increasing use of apprenticeship programs; and improving pay. Another target is growing the Pentagon’s congressionally mandated cyber academic engagement office, which Gorak leads and was created this year.
But DOD missed one goal it slated for 2024: creating a fund for defense and cyber workforce development, Gorak said. That effort won’t mature until 2027.
“The one initiative we didn’t get to that we had focused on for FY24 was the establishing of a dedicated fund for the defense and cyber workforce. And now we took a closer look at that, and we’re going to need a lot more support on that, so we’ve actually changed the timeline,” Gorak said.
The fund is similar to others in the department and would be used to help with recruitment, retention, and placing interns or individuals on assignment, Gorak said.
“I can use some of this fund to actually have a two-year internship program where they have two years to bring them in, test them out, train them, develop them, and then have that flexibility in that timeline to then hire as authorizations become open,” he said.
The money could also be used to train employees on new skills.
“So if part of the segment of the workforce isn’t qualified in a certain skill, then this fund would actually pay for that centralized training so that we can make sure that our readiness is increased,” he said. “And again, this isn’t new, but actually centralizing this and actually getting the funding to support this is the challenge to make this happen.”
