# Moe Chizari at VA: position descriptions and skill matching for the IT office

VA, 2018 to 2019. Last changed 15 October 2026. Other roles: https://chizari.me/work/

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.

## Timeline

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

## Sources

1. [GovTribe, Delivery Order GS00F143CA-36C10B18F2604 (Grant Thornton LLP, VA Technology Acquisition Center)](https://govtribe.com/award/federal-contract-award/delivery-order-gs00f143ca-36c10b18f2604)
2. [USAspending, award 36C10B18F2604 to Grant Thornton LLP](https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_36C10B18F2604_3600_GS00F143CA_4732)
3. [GAO-19-476T, Veterans Affairs: Addressing IT Management Challenges Is Essential to Effectively Supporting the Department's Mission (April 2019)](https://gao.gov/assets/700/698515.pdf)
4. [OPM, Introduction to the Position Classification Standards (revised August 2009)](https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/classifying-general-schedule-positions/positionclassificationintro.pdf)
5. [Karpukhin et al., Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (EMNLP 2020)](https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.550.pdf)
6. [GAO-19-144, Cybersecurity Workforce: Agencies Need to Accurately Categorize Positions to Effectively Identify Critical Staffing Needs (March 2019)](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-144.pdf)
7. [GAO-18-93, Federal Chief Information Officers: Critical Actions Needed to Address Shortcomings and Challenges in Implementing Responsibilities (August 2018)](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-93)

Interactive demo on this page: Try it: skill matching. Score a made-up team against the skills a position needs, the matrix idea behind a skill-matching model. Not VA data.

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