U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

From 2018 to 2019 I was a Senior Associate in Grant Thornton's Public Sector practice, supporting the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer organizations of the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Information and Technology (OIT). The work ran under Grant Thornton's management-support task order with VA. Agency facts and figures come from the public documents listed at the end.

What I did

The task order is delivery order 36C10B18F2604, which VA's Technology Acquisition Center awarded to Grant Thornton on 5 January 2018 for "financial support services and CIO support services", under the firm's GSA schedule contract GS00F143CA [1] [2]. OIT is VA's central IT office. It is led by the Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology, who is also VA's Chief Information Officer [3].

I revised position descriptions and built a skill-matching model that pairs employee skill sets with position requirements, to cut backlog and attrition. In federal practice a position description is the official record of the duties management assigns to a position, and a position is classified on the duties actually performed [4].

The skill matching was built on matrix-based scoring of skills against requirements, under availability constraints. That is the same bilinear structure that underlies modern embedding retrieval, where a question and a passage are each turned into a vector and scored by the dot product of the two [5].

At Grant Thornton I worked in R, Python, SQL, Excel/VBA optimization and Tableau for executive reporting.

What the public record shows

As of January 2019, OIT had about 15,800 staff, and contractors filled more than half of those positions [3]. VA has run its IT through this one central office since 2007 [3]. Congress enacted $4.1 billion for OIT for FY2019, and VA asked for about $4.3 billion for FY2020 [3].

In the same years, agencies were coding their IT positions under a new law. The Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Assessment Act, enacted in December 2015, required agencies to assign work role codes to their IT, cybersecurity and cyber-related positions [6]. In OPM data as of May 2018, VA had coded 3,008 of its 6,636 IT management (2210 series) positions, 45 percent, as "000": the code for positions that do no IT, cybersecurity or cyber-related work. Across the agencies GAO reviewed, the share was about 19 percent [6]. In March 2019 GAO recommended that VA review those codes. VA agreed and said it was conducting a cyber coding review [3] [6].

In August 2018 GAO reported that, of six areas of key CIO responsibilities, VA had fully addressed two and had not addressed IT workforce at all [3] [7].

The order's period of performance ended on 10 May 2021. USAspending shows $66.8 million obligated on it, and GovTribe lists a potential value of $88.6 million [1] [2]. These figures describe the agency and the contract. They do not measure my own work.

Try it: skill matching on public occupation data

Pick one of ten IT and project occupations as a position, weight its requirements, and see how all ten published skill and knowledge profiles score against it, or which of 910 occupations are closest, using the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET® 31.0 Database; each profile is an occupation average, not a person. [8]

The workforce in OPM's public data

OPM's Federal Workforce Data counts the employees of VA's Office of Information and Technology, under the two codes for the Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology's offices (VAEA and VAEB), at each fiscal year end. The shaded band marks my years, 2018 to 2019. These are public counts for the whole office, not figures from my work. [9]

OIT employees in OPM's September snapshots, 2014 to 2025, and in August 2026, the newest file: 7,820 in September 2014, 8,813 at the high in September 2021, 6,639 in August 2026. [9]

Hires (accessions, transfers in included) and departures (separations of every kind) by fiscal year, counted by the date each action took effect. In fiscal year 2025, 62 joined and 1,063 left, 652 of them under the Deferred Resignation Program. [10]

The numbers

Snapshot	Employees
September 2014	7,820
September 2015	8,036
September 2016	7,995
September 2017	8,067
September 2018	7,833
September 2019	8,224
September 2020	8,797
September 2021	8,813
September 2022	8,509
September 2023	8,708
September 2024	8,615
September 2025	8,238
August 2026	6,639

Fiscal year	Hires	Departures
FY2015	486	372
FY2016	468	508
FY2017	158	430
FY2018	526	460
FY2019	814	461
FY2020	974	435
FY2021	641	632
FY2022	581	869
FY2023	587	427
FY2024	240	330
FY2025	62	1,063

Timeline

December 2015The Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Assessment Act becomes law. [6]
5 January 2018VA awards delivery order 36C10B18F2604 to Grant Thornton for financial and CIO support services. [1] [2]
May 2018In OPM data, VA has 3,008 of its 6,636 IT management positions coded "000". [6]
2018 to 2019I revise position descriptions and build the skill-matching model.
2 August 2018GAO reports that VA had not addressed the IT workforce area of CIO responsibilities. [3] [7]
January 2019OIT has about 15,800 staff, more than half of them contractors. [3]
12 March 2019GAO recommends that VA review its "000" codes. VA agrees. [3] [6]
10 May 2021The order's period of performance ends. [1] [2]

Sources

This page includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. Mohamed Chizari has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.

Agency names are where the work was done. They are not endorsements.

Position descriptions and skill matching for the IT office.