Count Craig Orgeron as among the optimistic.
The CIO of Mississippi — a tech leader who recently returned to public service — told Government Technology that the tech kids are all right, so to speak.
“The younger generation, I think they have the pull of public service,” he said at the NASCIO 2024 Annual Conference.
Many of Orgeron’s peers said the same, including Montana CIO Kevin Gilbertson.
“I think that the mission focus is still resonating, at least with the folks that we’ve been working with in Montana,” he said, noting they’ve recently added some younger staff on their security and development teams.
States are striving to land fresh talent in a variety of ways, including by paying to educate promising candidates. Agencies need to replace workers ready to retire while hiring professionals who can handle modern programming languages, artificial intelligence and other relatively new parts of the government technology work.
In Mississippi, updated job classifications are helping Orgeron and his colleagues sell the idea of doing at least a short tenure in gov tech. That means, for instance, that the state can offer job classifications in the public cloud or cybersecurity or other areas that match the realities of the private job market.
“It’s sort of a conversational game-changer,” Orgeron said.
