Security clearances are among the most frequently requested credentials for tech workers, but a persistent backlog in clearance applications has led to significant talent shortages in the federal workforce. Getting cleared talent the right certifications and/or training is a key piece in solving the shortage puzzle.
Joe Mitchell, Chief Operating Officer at Skillstorm and Patrick Walsh, Executive Vice President of Training and technology at Skillstorm chatted with Leslie Weinstein of Defense TechCast about training opportunities to fill the current talent shortage. Skillstorm helps organizations in the commercial and federal sectors design, build, and retain their tech workforce at scale.
Scarcity of Talent in the DoD
Leslie Weinstein:
Okay, and that’s very interesting. I want to go back to that topic, but first before we jump into all the details, can you guys talk a little bit about the massive deficit of talent in the tech space that exists currently in the United States, but also around the world?
Joe Mitchell:
So look, there’s a huge scarcity of talent in the U.S. and across Europe. If you look at the U.S. education system, there are 17 million people in higher ed today. Of the 17 million people, 4 million people graduate each year, and of the 4 million people that graduate, only 65,000 to 70,000 have some type of IT-related degree, and there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of open roles going unfilled each and every year and that number is just compounding on itself. Even with the recent announcements of tech layoffs, what we’re seeing is those people are getting jobs immediately and the gap is still huge. There was a recent announcement about 700,000 open cyber roles. Now, even if we’re double counting, it’s still 350,000 open cyber roles today in the US, and how are we going to fill that?
I think a bigger challenge than that is for many years what we’ve done is we’ve outsourced our intellectual capital to other countries that have filled these roles very cheaply and what that’s also done is it’s essentially created this vacuum of not being able to fill these roles that are becoming more and more in demand and they’re becoming more plentiful. It’s also, to a certain extent, if you look at the number of open cybersecurity roles, it’s also a national security risk.
How do we actually look to plug that gap? And we can’t take four years to do it. A traditional education system isn’t going to fill that gap, so how can we actually fill that gap? It’s through working with various organizations and working with the workforce and these commercial organizations to actually think about what are the types of skills that we need, not degrees, what are the types of skills that we need to ensure we can successfully either create the cyber engineers that we need or the full stack engineers or the cloud engineers that we need to really be competitive and stay competitive here in the US.
Investing in the Right Talent
Leslie Weinstein:
How do you select the next talent? What do you kook for ink tech professionals?
Joe Mitchell:
We’re working today with universities all across the country from Florida to New York to California, and we’ve actually integrated as authorized training partners for Amazon, for Salesforce, for CompTIA, for Pega, for Appian. We have now integrated programs in many schools across the country to train their students and their graduates in today’s most in demand technologies. What we’re doing is we’re getting early access to see which of these college students and recent graduates have the technical capability to be able to attain some very basic industry credentials and some advanced industry credentials actually.
We’re also working very closely with the VA. This year alone we’re going to train over 1,000 transitioning service members and veterans in cloud, cyber and full stack development, so we have unprecedented early access to people who are looking to get into the technology field where we’re training them for anywhere between eight weeks and 16 weeks prior to even bringing them into our organization.
Patrick Walsh:
The rapid pace of technology change makes it even more difficult. When we look at the goal posts continuing to change cloud, people are going to cloud, people are breaking down monoliths in the microservices, the technology keeps changing, and so that’s where we’re able to stay on top of that change and we get what we get from colleges. You have to start somewhere. College does a really good job of getting people the basic foundations of computer science, networking, computing, databases, disks, all that stuff that’s necessary to get into the field and then we build on top of that. We work backward from what our clients are telling us, what jobs are out there, working backward from their needs as you said, what are you qualified? What is it required to do to this job, work backward from that and scope out well, where are people coming out with? What knowledge do they have coming out from college? Then our program is designed to fill that gap specifically from those job qualifications back to where the candidates are coming from.
Particularly in our vet tech program as a VA preferred provider, we’re taking a big risk on that. We train people without any obligation of getting paid unless we find them jobs. So everything we do here is all about tangible job outcomes. We train people not to a curriculum that we feel is right, but to what the market is demanding.
Finding the Right Skill Sets
Leslie Weinstein:
I have one question about the skillset. The candidates that you look for, do they already have a baseline set of skills from a college, besides the VA program, but do people come to you with a certain baseline and you kind of apply your learning and training on top of that?
Patrick Walsh:
That depends on the program. As Joe said, we work with universities to provide certification programs. For that, they’re all still sometimes college graduates. We work with the school of continuing ed with a lot of our partners, so people coming from various backgrounds and different proficiency levels. In our VA program, with our the vet tech program, a lot of people come in with maybe some skills, but it’s all the job skills that they learned in the military, doing radio comms, working with missiles and tanks and stuff, and so they have some kind of skills that they’re able to build on top of and move into cyber and cloud. A lot of people tinker with hardware in the military and then want to find something to apply that to in the world and cyber and cloud seem to be a natural transition for them. But everyone comes from different walks of life. For some of our programs, yes, when we groom people to get into some of the largest GSIs and companies out there, it’s about finding the people who are the premier, the top talent in those programs. We really try to find programs that really cater to everybody to try to address the problem from different angles.
The Role of Soft Skills
Leslie Weinstein:
With that being said, have you guys noticed any, or do you specifically look for soft skills, things that are maybe innate to certain people like a sense of … The people that want to, well, one, they have to want to be there and want to do this job, but are there other things or attributes that you look for that are indicators of high performing tech professionals?
Joe Mitchell:
Absolutely. We’re looking for people who come in with really strong soft skills. We work with four of the big five organizations, the GSIs essentially. A lot of the folks there are client facing, so you have to be a great communicator, a great collaborator, a great team player. We’re really looking at their entire background. What have they done prior to coming into or joining Skillstorm? Have they got experience in managing teams, leading teams, whether they’re student groups or associations or whether it’s in the military, what experience do they have being part of teams and leading groups? Yes, we’re always constantly looking for that. And are they good collaborators? I’ll let Patrick talk to it because obviously in these sprints, we need to be able to make sure that they can work together collectively.
Patrick Walsh:
We design programs that are built around experiential project-based learning. They develop something together on a team so we see can they collaborate on a team building a product together? When they get to the job, they have to be able to do that. They have to be able to present a solution to a client and describe and defend their positioning for why they chose to architect something a certain way. All of those skills are things that we put into our program to get people job ready in a client facing capacity.
Time Investment for Training
Leslie Weinstein:
How long on average or maybe low range to high range, how long does it take to take somebody who maybe already has some college either credits or degree, how long does it take to train these people to get them ready to deliver to clients in the real world?
Patrick Walsh:
Generally anywhere from 10 to 12 weeks for most people that come out of maybe a CS degree, IT background, someone not necessarily with a STEM degree, but maybe they’ve already done some coding just as a hobby or something like that. Those people take about 10 to 12 weeks because we really build on top of the foundation that the education system provides and give them those skills specifically. If you’re, say a cyber engineer or someone who’s aspiring to get into cyber, maybe a bachelor’s degree in CS or cyber security, maybe you get an A plus, a network plus, or security plus certification, that helps you understand foundational cyber concepts but then our clients are saying, “Well, we’ve got a Zscaler project,” or .”We’re doing an IAM implementation,” or, “We’re using Splunk and SOAR platforms.” These are things that colleges are not going out and grabbing all of those tools, but that’s what you need to be productive day one, so that’s what we focus on filling the gap is the job skills, but the foundational skills need to be there for you to be able to appreciate what you’re building in those tools.
Leslie Weinstein:
Is this full-time, like eight hours a day for 10 to 12 weeks?
Joe Mitchell:
Yeah. Yeah, it absolutely is. It can even go up to 16 weeks depending on the specific technologies that they’re looking for. As Patrick mentioned, we’re essentially designing the workforce for our clients. They will come to us and they will say, “We need a cyber engineer with these skills,” or, “We need a cloud engineer with these skills,” or, “We need a full stack engineer with these skills,” and we design the curriculum and then we deploy people at scale. This isn’t one or two, this is 10, 20, 100, 200 people at a time or over a period of time that we can deploy with exactly the skills that they need. Yeah, so the time varies based on the skillset.
Retaining Talent
Leslie Weinstein:
With all of the job openings and all of this talent shortage, and you guys are churning out all of these highly qualified and skilled professionals, how do you prevent them from leaving? Because the same thing happens in the intelligence community. Anybody who has a security clearance already has a job, and yet clearancejobs.com, that’s where you go to try to find another intel job and we already all have jobs, we’re just moving around. How do you prevent your highly skilled people from being poached immediately?
Joe Mitchell:
Yeah, so a great question. I think really I’ve got twofold answer to that. One is most importantly, we’re making an enormous investment in the professional development of these people, young professionals who are emerging into the tech field and it’s on us to essentially make sure that they are treated well, they are trained incredibly well, and they’re up to a certain standard. Most importantly, training and learning tech is something that you are constantly doing, it never stops, so we continue to provide professional development above and beyond the 12 or 16 weeks so that this goes on for two years or more.
In fact, we have a program, it’s called Stormer for Life and if you are with us for two years, you continue to get all of your courses at no cost so that you can continue to progress professionally. That’s the first part, which I think is by far and away the most important. I think the people who we work with really value the investment that we’re making in helping to launch their careers as essentially middle-level professionals.
The second part is because we’re making such an investment, they work with us and they have an agreement that they will stay with us for two years, which gives a lot of reassurance to our clients that those folks are going to be there. We have a 98% retention rate as part of this, which we’re very proud of. But I’d say the most important factor is that we treat everybody really well and we provide enormous professional developments and growth opportunities.
Patrick Walsh:
One thing I’d add to that, I don’t think that the mission of the company is about creating an army of contractors who are out on projects. We are about building talent. We’re not a consulting firm doing services with billable contractors. That’s not what our core business is. I think the main thing that really addressing a problem in the field now is just, particularly in the DOD space, I lived in the DMV area for a while, everybody’s got the badge and they just recycle from one project to another. What we’re trying to address, not just from our perspective and having billing contractors, but it’s about getting more people in the industry, creating that new talent, finding more people because a typical staffing firm just looks at the same pile of resumes that every other staffing firm looks at. We’re trying to inject new talent in, and whether those people stay with us at Skillstorm for their whole career, that’s not really our goal. Our goal is to create opportunity, help people get further faster after their relationship with Skillstorm.
Matching Veterans to the Program
Leslie Weinstein:
Okay. This is a perfect segue. How do veterans get into this vet tech program? Is that something that’s closed and moving forward, or is this something that you’re always looking for new vets to help?
Joe Mitchell:
Yeah. No, every single month we are enrolling between 80 and 120 transitioning service members and veterans into our program. We work very closely with the VA. You can find us on the VA’s website. You can come directly to Skillstorm and apply. It’s very easy. It’s a one click apply for any veteran who’s interested in entering the tech field to sign up and to inquire about their eligibility. We’d encourage any veteran looking to get into tech to consider this because this program is a 16 week program, and it’s a 640 hour immersive program with exactly the same rigor that we provide for our large GSIs and end clients.
Leslie Weinstein:
Do you know off the top of your head what the eligibility criteria are? Do they have to be recent veterans? Do they have to be current service members transitioning currently, or can people who maybe got out 10 or 15 years ago apply?
Joe Mitchell:
The answer to that is it’s both. We’re also a skill bridge provider, approved provider, so that means transitioning service members can, in the last six months, could join this program and will be eligible for it and veterans are also eligible for it. If you have one day of eligibility with your GI Bill, just one day, it doesn’t impact your GI Bill, but if you have one day of eligibility, you’re typically eligible for this vet tech program.
Leslie Weinstein:
What about MOSs? Are they restricted? Are you looking for only certain MOSs, like a 25 series in the Army, or is it open to any MOS?
Joe Mitchell:
It’s open to anyone and everyone. We’ve got captains. We have the whole spectrum of people in the military from people who have been in for four or five years, the people who have been in for 25 years. It’s a great group of people and a really diverse group of people.
Patrick Walsh:
We have a rigorous screening process for some of our other programs. For the vet tech program screening process is just based on the desire, the innate ability. We have a couple assessments that they do. They’re a pretty brief assessment process, games that they play to check for problem solving and pattern recognition, that’s kind of raw skills that are there. We do an assessment, a verbal interview with our training team to check to see that they have just basic computer understanding and things like that. There’s some, right, because we do want people that are here that maybe know a little bit more than just a typical iPhone user. They should know a little bit about computers before getting started, but nowhere near what we expect for maybe someone coming out from a four year degree program. That’s definitely not the expectation for our vet tech program.
Earning Certifications
Leslie Weinstein:
Speaking broadly about everybody who finishes, do people, do they earn certifications during this program or is that something they already have going into it, or are they able to earn them through the program?
Patrick Walsh:
Yeah, the goal of all of our programs is to get industry credentials. For, say, our cyber programs minimum expectation, people are coming out with Security Plus and many of them coming out with a CSA plus or a Pentest plus. We have an AWS program that is the goal is to get the solutions architect associate and teach them DevOps tools. Our Java program focuses on the Oracle certified associate, so everything, that badge at the end gives them something that says, “Here’s an industry recognized credential that validates my knowledge in that technical space.”
DOD’s new 8140 manual
Leslie Weinstein:
Back to the topic we started with originally – the DOD’s new 8140 manual that puts a timeline on these qualification requirements. It’s two years for cybersecurity professionals with those work roles and then three years for all of the other. I would be interested to see how your company over the next two years maps everything that you’re doing to the 8140 because DOD is the largest agency in the entire world, let alone the federal government, so I imagine you guys have a lot of professionals at your training to support defense contracts, and they will have to be qualified on day one. We don’t have too much time because these are typically short interviews, short and to the point, but I just want to kind of condense everything that you’ve told me about what it takes to create a fully qualified cyber professional.
First you have to find the talent, you go out and you’re actively looking at universities, you’re looking at the VA, military. Then you give them assessments to figure out if they have the aptitude or the potential to learn. Then you train them between 10 to 16 weeks, full days. Some of them already have a foundation. Some you’re teaching these job skills, then you treat them well, and then you value them, you let them know that they’re valued, and then you provide continual training and professional development. How in the world are small businesses or the Department of Defense as a federal agency and even other federal age, how are they supposed to do that? You guys are turning out hundreds of professionals every year, and obviously the government is having an issue with that. How can the government, or can you guys help the government or figure out some sort of way to scale this whole operation so that it’s not just you guys in these other companies doing similar things? How we can they compete? How does the DOD do this? Any suggestions? Because I feel like they’re struggling with this too, and this is your whole business model, and that’s not their business model. They’re in the business of national security and defense.
Joe Mitchell:
I think there’s no one silver bullet, there’s no one way to fix this, and there’s plenty of opportunity for education to weigh in and to help and for workforce development organizations similar to ourself to help and for the large and small federal contractors to help. We’re actually working directly with the large and the small federal contractors who have these cyber needs and cloud needs and all and the like. But what we’re doing, there’s two ways in which we’re addressing it. One is what we’ve talked about today, which is working with federal contractors to understand their needs, what they look like today and what they’ll look like in six, 12, 18 months time so that we can help them scale the number of people that they need in order to fulfill these projects.
The other thing that we’re doing, and we’re doing this in collaboration actually with Clearance Jobs, is we’re providing all of these industry credential courses through ClearanceJobs now to all ClearanceJobs members. The same teams that are essentially training these engineers here at Skillstorm and also training students at universities and college graduates, we’re now with our partnership with ClearanceJobs actually opening this up to members of ClearanceJobs so that, you could gain these industry credentials, whether it’s CompTIA or whether it’s AWS or Salesforce or whatever credentials that people are interested in gaining so that those folks can actually access these careers too with or without Skillstorm. You could use the ClearanceJobs platform, once you’ve got the skills, you can use the ClearanceJobs platform to find talent yourself. We’re integrating, actually, essentially a exclusive pool of people that we have into the ClearanceJobs platform to make them more accessible to the small organizations, the small federal organizations that they can hire one or two rather than hire 100 at a time. I think there are many ways that we can address it. We just cannot, and there’s no one organization that can address it collectively. We all have to work together. This is a real big issue and it’s going to take many, many years to solve.
Leslie Weinstein:
If you’ve taught me nothing else, it’s that you literally cannot hire anybody off the street. It takes a lot to create a qualified cyber professional, and one cyber professional is not the same as the next cyber professional, and they’re all very niche and require specialized training. Yeah, this is a huge problem and I think you guys have a great operation in churning out all of these qualified professionals. I think this is fantastic. Is there anything else you guys want to talk about or highlight or mention that we haven’t?
Patrick Walsh:
On that point, I definitely think that this is kind of an assembly line operation. I think everybody seems to think that they can do it all themselves. College is supposed to do all of the learning and then people are just supposed to be job ready. I think the way that tech has evolved over the years, that’s not the case. You have to have some sort of program after college that takes you to the next step, so kind of a daisy chain of all these different services and an assembly line to get people actually ready to do the job. It starts at college, but that’s not the end, so it’s just another place to plug in and that’s what we try to do is we plug into large organizations and try to give this last mile training at scale is our goal.
Joe Mitchell:
It’s all about us being able to understand and tomorrow’s workforce needs and working backwards from that and to give people skills. I think what we are seeing is given the huge skills gap that exists today, as we’re seeing more and more companies actually remove the degree requirements and move to skills based hiring over degree based hiring. I think I heard somebody say the other day, “A degree gets you a promotion, skills get you jobs.” If you’ve got the right skills, you can always get the degree. Our ability to find the right people in the right places, whether you are in the military or whether you’re in the education system, and providing they’ve got the right soft skills and the right aptitude, our ability to give those folks the skills that they need to be impactful day one and hit the ground running is really important to these organizations. I think that is one of the biggest things I think we can take away from this, is that the organizations that we work with, they want us to make all the investment so that the people who join their organization is immediately productive day one, so there’s no handholding day one, that they immediately hit the ground running and I think that’s a really big piece.
