Career

Federal Coach: How to be Happy at Work

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage and one of the world’s leading experts in human potential, has lectured on his research in 48 countries. After more than a decade at Harvard University, Achor founded Good Think Inc. to share this research with organizations worldwide. This interview was conducted by Tom Fox, author of theRead… Read more »

Cloudera and SGI Partner: With new benchmarks and better mission support the result

During the recent GEOINT conference I spoke with SGI and Cloudera about the meaning of their recent announcement. They just announced a strategic agreement where SGI will ship Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Enterprise Management Suite factory installed on SGI Hadoop Clusters. Although this is good news for both companies there isRead… Read more »

Weekly Round-up: October 28, 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda It’s not real until it’s on YouTube. Writing in Huffington Post and Aol.Gov, respectively, Alex Howard and Deanna Glick cover Steven VanRoekel’s inaugural appearance on YouTube as the US CIO, filmed in California. Perhaps unsprising, given the speaker and the audience, VanRoekel said “America’s future now depends on our capacity to innovate, andRead… Read more »

Recruitment 411: Lessons of Leadership Part 3 – Setting up for Success

Today’s guest blogger is Eric Erickson, a communications specialist with the IRS Recruitment Office. They say life is full of important lessons. I’m not sure who ‘they’ is, but I found out recently that they are correct. I spent about two months as the acting manager of the branch where my usual duties revolve aroundRead… Read more »

Would a Learning Contracting Officer Help Your Agency?

In general, there are three types of contracting officers — the procuring contracting officer, the termination contracting officer and the administrative contracting officer. It may be time to add a fourth type — the learning contracting officer (LCO). You see, contracts specialists train to become full-fledged contracting officers. Much of what we contracts specialists doRead… Read more »

What makes older federal workers’ job satisfaction decline?

Note: I work for the Washington Post to produce our weekly “Fed Buzz” column, written by GovLoop staff. The column appears on the Fed Page of WashingtonPost.com. If you have ideas for questions you’d like us to explore in the weekly column, please send me a message through GovLoop or email [email protected]. You can alsoRead… Read more »

GovExpert: Dr. Kathryn Newcomer, Director of the Trachtenberg School for Public Policy and Public Administration

Dr. Kathryn Newcomer is the current Director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University and a foremost authority on program evaluation (see full bio below). Why is the knowledge of program evaluation so important to a government employee? Program evaluation entails the application of social science analyticalRead… Read more »