Expanded Training and Rotations Can Be Powerful Incentives
For candidates with a sense of mission, cyber jobs with state and local governments can be incredibly fulfilling. While state and local agencies cannot pay as well as the private sector, they can offer the incentive to learn and grow in their trade while serving the public.
To that end, jurisdictions should focus on training programs as a retention tool and incorporate recurring skills training into their workforce development strategies. To be clear, that’s not just doing annual awareness training but instead ensuring that folks in IT and security can learn skills in cyber defense, digital forensics, cloud security, penetration testing, open-source intelligence, leadership, Incident Command System and more.
Not only does this help evolve the cyber skills of state and local tech employees, it also improves the ability of governments to compete for talent with private sector organizations, which often offer training to ensure their staff have high-level, technical skill sets.
In a similar vein, setting up a workforce plan in which staff can rotate into new jobs or skill areas after two- or three-year cycles also can help. For example, if someone serves as a security operations center analyst for three years, they could then be provided training options in another area, such as digital forensics and incident response or cloud, so the team member can then move into a role in those domains and be effective.
EXPLORE: Incident response is crucial to cyber resilience.
Academic Partnerships Are Valuable Recruitment Tools
State and local government agencies should also build partnerships with local academic institutions, workforce development organizations and membership groups to recruit talent. A great way to do this is to create bridge programs such as internships and apprenticeships that lead to full-time roles.
These recommendations don’t require big spending or budget outlays, but they do require a fair amount of care and planning to execute properly. It is worth the effort to attract the kind of talent that wants to work in government and constantly evolve to improve performance and versatility. Those are the kind of frontline cyber workers that will make the difference when a local agency is targeted.
Technology is evolving more quickly than ever. While this progress can be a boon for government functions such as citizen services, it also means attackers are using those same tools to orchestrate attacks. State and local governments may not hold the massive trove of personal information stored by the federal government, but disrupting their operations can cause a lot of damage well beyond the intended target.
Building a robust and resilient cybersecurity staff will go a long way toward combating those attacks. State and local governments can foster that talent, but they must take steps now to make it happen.
UP NEXT: AI isn’t new to cybersecurity, but some of its use cases are.
