The Center of Excellence

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2020

As the demand for experienced professionals rise, especially in the area of hard-to-source STEM skills, finding qualified employees can be challenging. More challenging was Fulton County Government’s (FCG) practice of many years, to pay nominal compensation for highly technical, specialized jobs – jobs for which private industry pays more. The challenge it faced was acquiring highly skilled talent who could serve as resources for County staff, within multiple departments, to assist in providing more efficient services – all within budget.FCG needed to secure hard-to-source talent with limited resources. The solution lay in how creatively the administration and management of FCG’s Department of Information Technology (IT) could engage staff to rethink its traditional funding of internships to exponentially maximize its efforts, and secure hard-to-source resources to help it better manage its departments and services. To maintain business relevance in a fiercely competitive and rapidly changing digital age, it had to do something different to replace its traditional approach to staffing to be competitive in its search for qualified talent. The Center of Excellence was FCG’s “different” and its spin was in maximizing program funding without increasing its budget.