As both the cyberthreat landscape and emerging technologies evolve, the federal government is facing an inflection point in how it recruits, retains and develops cybersecurity talent.

Federal officials and industry experts said a shift toward continuous learning and development will better align the federal workforce with the rapidly changing technology field. Adding career flexibility, including through upskilling or reskilling, can also help agencies adapt to changing needs.

Improving retention across the federal cyber workforce is a critical piece of the puzzle, said Christopher Bloor, defense and intel director at the SANS Institute,.

“How can we assess where people are, train them to where they need to go? As we’re looking to retain individuals within the cyber workforce, that’s a motivating factor,” said Bloor, who joined leaders from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, White House and University of Maryland, Baltimore County for a panel discussion during Federal News Network’s Cyber Leaders Exchange 2026.

“How are we able to do that effectively? How can we make sure that they are not stressed out? That is where we need to really focus our efforts — on the people that we have that are on staff today.”

At the same time, the types of skills the cyber workforce needs are also changing. Soft skills are becoming increasingly important, said Richard Forno, associate director of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Institute.

“The necessary skills fall into two categories: the technical skills, and those change weekly, daily, annually, depending on what’s happening as technology evolves,” Forno said. “But equally important are the professional skills, the soft skills that are needed to be effective in the workplace to put that technology to use. Things like critical thinking, being able to work well with others, communicating. That’s equally as important as the actual hands-on skills that we all tend to focus on.”

To support the growing skills needs of the federal cyber workforce, CISA attunes its training and development programs to match the rapidly changing workforce, while also aligning with broader cyber strategies across government.

Over time, flexible, on-demand learning programs are becoming more popular, said Michael Harpin, acting chief of CISA’s Cyber Training Branch.

“We’ve seen with our training a lot of popularity and a lot of positive feedback to the modular hands-on type of training, giving people experience with those different types of technology,” Harpin said. “But we still do have a lot of popularity and growth for some of our incident response pathways, some of our cloud vulnerability analysis type courses as well. So yes, there is a lot of popularity in those on-demand styles of learning, but we are seeing continued growth and continued interest in those instructor-led trainings.”

Many of the overarching trends for the federal cyber workforce also align with pillar six of the Trump administration’s National Cyber Strategy. The pillar focuses on building cyber talent and capacity by expanding pipelines into cybersecurity careers, upskilling or reskilling current employees and retaining expertise.

White House Deputy Assistant National Cyber Director for Cyber Workforce Brandon Dues described the current workforce challenge, in part, as a “speed and scale” problem.

“We have to do this faster and cheaper and at scale than we’ve done before because we face such a national shortage in terms of cyber workers,” said Dues, an appointee in the Office of the National Cyber Director. “But we also know that with the advent of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, we have to develop new skills. We have to adapt over time. So we’re thinking about new pathways for that.”

As AI, emerging technologies and evolving threats reshape cybersecurity, agencies will need to create flexible career pathways and academic partnerships to build a cyber workforce tailored to future needs.

“It’s so hard to predict what the technologies are going to be in five to 10 years. But we’re using that unique mission space, using our industry partners to offer that flexibility on different modalities of training that we can offer to upskill the workforce, the different topics that we can cover, and the speed at which we can get some of these trainings out as well,” Harpin said. “That’s a big part of the partnership we have with industry — and then being able to understand those priorities from the administration down to the leadership within our own organization, to know that we’re filling those gaps that the cyber workforce has.”

Going forward, it will also be important for agencies to implement continuous training and development opportunities to ensure the cyber workforce can meet rising risks and threats.

“There needs to be an ongoing effort and, I’ll say, some healthy competition for people to get involved and say, ‘How can I be better tomorrow?’ ” Bloor said. “What is that ongoing educational effort? How can we build out that learning pathway, not just for an entire organization, but down to the individual level? That’s the paramount thing that we all are focusing on and addressing.”

On the recruitment end, agencies should be tapping further into underused talent sources. Those include veterans and military members, as well as employees with nontraditional educational backgrounds. Cyber workforce development should also start with exposure to opportunities in the field as early as possible.

“It’s not just the current snapshot now of the workforce,” Forno said. “We also have to ensure that we keep encouraging and motivating those who will become the workforce to pursue these types of careers, and foster that curiosity, that competitive spirit that will make them excellent cyber practitioners.”

Programs such as the Office of Personnel Management’s Tech Force hiring initiative may offer the beginnings of a bigger pipeline into government cyber work. Trump administration officials have emphasized an interest in making it easier for technologists to move between the federal and private sectors.

“The key piece that I’m looking at, from a workforce standpoint, is how do you change the mindset from a binary option for federal service? Instead of going into federal service and then just going elsewhere, you have an option to return,” Historically Dues said.

“We’ve had a number of different barriers there that have made it challenging for folks. We like to have continual interaction between the public and private and academic areas, and we think that’s a hallmark that we see amongst great workforces across the world. We know we have that. We just need to change and tweak a couple of things, and that’s what we’re focused on.”

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