The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced on Monday a new Early Career Talent Network, launched in partnership with the White House, to connect young talent with full-time career opportunities across the federal government.
The new network, available at EarlyCareers.gov, is intended to strengthen the federal hiring pipeline and give agencies access to a shared pool of candidates for critical mission roles. OPM said the effort is part of a broader push to modernize federal hiring and build the next generation of the public sector workforce.
“Building a strong pipeline of early-career talent is essential to the future of the federal workforce,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a press release. “We are making it easier for talented individuals to connect with meaningful careers in public service while helping agencies efficiently identify the talent they need to deliver results for the American people.”
In a blog post about the effort, Kupor said that roughly 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, compared to about 22% in the private sector workforce.
The Early Career Talent Network looks to fix this problem. It builds on the US Tech Force program that OPM launched in December to hire early-career technologists for two-year employment terms across the federal government.
The new network allows users to explore entry points into federal work across several career tracks, including roles in finance, human resources, engineering, project management, and procurement.
The site features a career quiz and directs candidates to USAJOBS openings, as well as events with federal recruiters.
“The ultimate goal here is very simple, but audacious: Make it really simple to match the best talent with the best opportunities,” Kupor wrote in his blog post. “The single-user mode of the past – where a single applicant applied to a single job opportunity as a single agency – doesn’t accomplish that goal. But a network model will.”