There is a tech talent deficit in the public sector — particularly when it comes to young workers. Just over 4% of federal IT employees were under the age of 30 (7.5% government-wide) in the fiscal year of 2023. And recruitment data suggests more than 80% of federal agencies report losing top tech talent to higher-paying private sector offers.
But with tech giants continuing to cut workforces and growing concerns around AI’s impact on knowledge work, job seekers are now increasingly prioritizing stability over salary. Yet tech remains a highly fluid labor market, with 1 in 3 professionals having switched jobs in the last two years.
While the public sector is perceived as more stable, it has also been viewed as bureaucratic and sluggish in technological adoption. An EY Center for Government Modernization commissioned study in 2024 found that 73% of surveyed government agency leaders believe the public sector lacks the incentives needed to attract top technical talent.
Both sides respectively struggle with retaining top talent — just as AI begins to rewrite the norms of work.
One recent attempt to change that equation: The US Tech Force, launched in December by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Gathering groups across government and industry, the tech force aims to recruit up to 1,000 top talent professionals into two-year government roles — with a heavy focus across modernization, cybersecurity, AI and data science.
NobleReach — a founding partner focused on developing and placing technical talent into public work, and the only non-profit of the group — is the acting glue between government agencies and its private-sector partners.
Arun Gupta, NobleReach's founder and CEO, believes the shift starts with how the work gets framed in the first place.
“We have been conditioned to talk about [public service and government] as a career,” he explained to Broadband Nation. “And one of the subtle, but I think important things that we're trying to change is: How do we talk about it as an experience?”
Careers per lifetime are already increasing in younger generations, with Gen Z expected to hold 5 careers and work for 15 employers across their lifetimes. That pattern is not predicted to stop in the wake of AI.
“You know, stability might be the new risk,” said Gupta.
Despite a societal conditioning to seek stable employment, “what if stability is no longer a reality? Maybe what we should be conditioning people to say is: always be testing and learning... assume everything is always changing,” he continued. “The only stable thing in that world then becomes purpose and mission.”
This is where his organization sees a chance to dispel myths and present public-sector work as meaningful and innovative — rather than being strapped down in red tape until retirement.
Instead of saying “‘Hey, come join us for a 30‑year career in public service’… we're saying, ‘Come experience two years and do some really mission‑driven work.' That's a very different way of approaching it,” Gupta detailed.
Dismantling ‘soft silos’
The private and public worlds have leaned on one another for centuries — dating back at least to ancient Rome — but the recent lens, in Gupta’s eyes, presents ambition and civic responsibility as mutually exclusive.
“Somehow we've found ourselves in a society where people think it's one or the other,” he explained. “If you're competing, and publicly and personally ambitious, you're told you're not kind... And if you're civically responsible and you're kind, you're told you're soft. The truth is, in a sports parlance, that would be called sportsmanship, right?”
Gupta believes that in academia, that split creates cultural “soft silos” in which business and tech dismiss public work as lethargic and lacking innovation, and the social sciences scorn the competitive appetite driving the private sector.
“The truth is you need both,” Gupta argued.
The program, he continued, is “really trying to bridge those soft silos and remove the rigidity around them and make them more malleable and permeable.”
NobleReach’s classes focus on bringing these silos into view for students — showing government can in fact drive innovation, and entrepreneurs can serve the public. From fast-moving data governance projects to hands-on mentorship in local agencies, alumni speak to the program’s ability to connect technical work with meaningful public service.
“What students saw is: the money following the mission versus the other way around,” Gupta reflected.
While pay-bands have also been a critique of government positions within tech, the program purports scholar salaries to range between $70,000 and $90,000 with a one-time stipend of $18,000.
The first cohort launched in 2024, placing 20 scholars across eight federal agencies — with around 250 applications. Last year, applicants soared to over 1,200, according to Gupta. Now, with the added resource of the tech force, 2026 is a year for scaling.
Rather than looking at the project as a public servant pipeline, “we say we're creating a community of dual citizens, public-private sector citizens, people that understand the public sector and private sector,” concluded Gupta. “They understand the language, the culture, the networks in both. And in doing that, we're going to rebuild trust.”
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