From: mea culpa (jerichoDIMENSIONAL.COM)
Date: Wed Aug 18 1999 - 20:16:57 CDT

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From: Super-User <rootrgfsparc.cr.usgs.gov>

>Government faces security skills shortage

>Of most concern is the need for IT employees with information security
>skills, according to a recent federal report urging the creation of a
>massive intrusion-detection system to protect federal and critical private
>systems, such as energy, telecommunications and transportation, against
>cyberattack.

This has been a crusade of mine for some time now. One of the problems
here is that a lot of agencies have worded their CompSec job descriptions
such that the jobs get classified in the 1800 series, which means they are
considered law enforcement. Federal law prohibits anyone from entering
federal service in an LE capacity on or past their 37th birthday, because
LEs have their own retirement system, based on the federally-mandated LE
retirement age of 57. Since you must have been employed at least 20 years
to retire from the federal government, the magic number is therefore 37.
This means that those of us old geezers who have come up through the IT
ranks (getting most of our training not at the taxpayers' expense, I might
add) and been doing CompSec for 15 years are automatically excluded,
merely because we happen to be 37+.

I have argued, right up the chain to Congress, that this policy is based
on an invalid assumption; i.e., that people occupying an 1800 series
position are not qualified to transfer to another series at age 57. If you
get a degree in Criminal Justice and go right into the FBI out of college,
this *may* be a reasonable statement, although even then I don't really
believe it holds water. Be that as it may, what I have proposed is that
those of us who are already career feds in a non-LE series (and therefore
already part of some federal retirement scheme) should be allowed to
transfer to the 18xx positions, serve out what's left of our allowable
years, then transfer back to our old series, keeping the standard
retirement package (in most cases, FERS) we started with, rather than LE
retirement. This requires, of course, that the employees in question keep
up their former skills, but in the case of computer-related
classifications such as mine (0334, Computer Specialist), this really
isn't an issue.

I've gotten some favorable response on this proposal, but knowing the
ponderous federal bureacracy the way I do, I doubt that any action will
come of it. It just seems a waste, with this IT personnel shortage they
keep talking about, to make matters even worse by excluding the most
qualified people from a fair proportion of the security positions. You
really can't learn applied CompSec from a book or in a classroom.

Internet Technologist
National Business Center, US DoI
Robert_G_Ferrellnbc.gov
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