The government is giving up on an important part of the cybersecurity workforce

“An individual on the spectrum that gets one of these jobs meets all of the same criteria that anybody else who applies for the job has to meet,” said Jim Cook.

Terry Gerton

May 6, 2025 1:42 pm

5 min read

Guest:	Jim Cook
Title:	Board Director, Melwood
Summary:	During the first Trump administration, MITRE led a team that proposed a new solution to the shortage of cybersecurity analysts–hiring neurodistinct individuals. The team launched successful pilot projects with NGA and then CISA. The new Trump administration terminated the contract just prior to completion but the lessons learned are still available.

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Interview transcript:

Jim Cook: The genesis of this really was to respond to an effort that then deputy director for management at OMB, Margaret Weichert, under the first Trump administration had launched to try to identify innovative ideas and solutions to tackle critical government management problems or challenges. And so she launched the gear center challenge program, as you recall, that was co-led by OMB and GSA. And some of my colleagues at MITRE, had some familiarity with a private sector program called Neurodiversity at Work. And she proposed an idea that I fully supported to try to take that program and model it or make adjustments to it to work in the federal government. The overriding objective, of course, is to address critical skills gaps. Many studies have reported it in certain areas and certain skill areas like cybersecurity and data analytics. They’re growing at such a rapid pace, there just isn’t enough people in the workforce to fulfill all of those needs. And so in order to tackle that, one of the things that we proposed at the time was to give the federal government the ability to expand the talent pool and create opportunities to get people with requisite skills, but perhaps struggled with certain barriers to employment to get them into the federal workforce. And so that was really the overriding objective behind the program is to is to create that capability within the federal government, modeled largely after what the private sector was doing, and other countries like Israel and Australia, which are really leading on this. The US Is behind, but catching up quickly.

Terry Gerton: So you started the focus with the Department of Homeland Security, the National Geospatial Agency particularly. Why connect neurodiversity and that agency?

Jim Cook: And principally, it was whoever stepped forward to volunteer, number one.

Terry Gerton: It’s always good to have a volunteer.

Jim Cook: Always good to have a volunteer, but number two, I would say that one of the things to note is that in focusing on the neurodistinct community, in particular people on the autism spectrum, which isn’t the only neurodistinct that we pay attention to, but they tend to have, not everyone, but a higher affinity for detail work, comfort with repetitive tasks, the ability to find patterns and connections that might otherwise be difficult to find. And so, as you can imagine from your own background, you can see a lot of alignment with some of the work that’s done in the intelligence community. And so I think that was in part one of the reasons why they were so anxious to step forward and put this to the test. And it went very, very well. And they brought one or two externs on that went through the programs full time. And then we continued to work with other agencies to explore their interest in participating in the program. The ultimate goal in this was not just to experiment with it, but to also capture the roadmap for how to do this in the federal government in a playbook. And so what’s been produced is an extension of the private sector playbook to now have a federal edition that speaks directly to how federal agencies with all the authorities. And regulations and policies that a federal agency has to follow. How can a federal do this and do this successfully? And those two pilots have contributed to that.

Terry Gerton: So those lessons, what were the big lessons that NGA and then CISA learned? I imagine it has a lot to do with hiring, but it may also have to do with setting conditions for success at work.

Jim Cook: Yes, I think those are two really valid and fair points, and I’d say that these are the lessons that I’ll speak to are sort of the lessons in general. I don’t want to speak again directly to or for NGA and CISA, but organizations that go through this process, by and large, learn a few things. First of all, it’s important for me to point out that none of this involves changing the criteria for the jobs themselves. An individual on the spectrum that gets one of these jobs meets all of the same requisite criteria that anybody else who applies for the job has to meet. We’re not watering down the requirements. We are looking at the barriers and the process that we use in the identification, interviewing, and hiring process in order to bring them on board. So as an example, one of the normal struggles that somebody on the autism spectrum has to deal with is difficulty in social interactions. So compare that with what we’ve learned in organizations over the years, which is how to do behavioral interviewing, especially for entry-level jobs, where perhaps there isn’t a significant body of experience to draw on, but we do focus a lot on connectivity in the interview process, eye contact, firmness of handshakes, and so forth and so on. These are the types of things that people on the spectrum would normally struggle with. So organizations have to learn that if you’re interviewing the same way you’ve always interviewed, you’re more likely to pass on somebody who may have all of the requisite skills to do the job and perhaps even do it at an exceptional level, all because you can’t get past the social interaction struggles. And so… Interviewing becomes more of a skills-based interviewing process, which is very much aligned with the priorities of the current administration and the focus on skills and meritocracy. So by shifting the interviewing process to more of the skills-base process, that begins to reduce one of the barriers that people on the spectrum, neurodistinct individuals by and large, would face in trying to get federal employment, they can’t even get through the interview process.