The Office of Personnel Management is applying artificial intelligence to modernize the writing of position descriptions in the hiring process. OPM Director Scott Kupor touted the agency’s new USA Class tool during an interview at the UiPath Fusion conference, presented by FedScoop, as a way to streamline notoriously slow and complex federal hiring. The federal government “has a lot of jobs,” the director said, with more than 600 classifications and a workforce north of 2 million civilian federal employees. “So the ‘n factorial’ is pretty significant.” Kupor said OPM sought to leverage AI’s strength in digesting large volumes of information — in this case, thousands of existing job descriptions — to train a model, and then prompted it to create new position descriptions aligned with OPM’s classification standards. Federal hiring managers then review the outputs to ensure accuracy, further strengthening the model.
The Pentagon plans to require service members to complete cybersecurity training once every three years, DefenseScoop has learned, a move that will scrap an annual mandate and is set to upend the Army’s recent shift to a five-year requirement. In a Sep. 30 memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the military to “restore mission focus” by reducing, consolidating or eliminating a slew of mandatory courses, such as cybersecurity training, that he said were distracting from the military’s core job of fighting wars. Hegseth did not specify by how much the services should “relax the mandatory frequency” of cybersecurity training, and by February, the Army issued its own directive that required soldiers to take the course once every five years instead of annually, DefenseScoop reported. But more than a month after the service’s directive, the Pentagon is moving to require troops to conduct cybersecurity training once every three years, according to a recent memo reviewed by the publication and a senior defense official, which would effectively overrule the Army’s move.
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