WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio – The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center recently hosted Bill Marion, the Air Force deputy chief information officer, for a roundtable event here for current and former PALACE Acquire interns in the cyberspace operations career field.
During the event, Marion spoke with attendees about his career experiences, priorities and highlighted where the cyberspace career field is today and where it is headed.
He also talked about challenges the career fields faces, and investments areas including Enterprise as a Service and mission defense teams.
“Enterprise IT as a Service and Mission Defense teams address two core challenges in our career field,” said Marion. “One is providing a better user experience for all things IT, whether that is getting more state of the art devices in people’s hands so that they can work better or easier with less interruption, and less outages. Second, we don’t have enough people in our technical career areas, whether that is cyber security, mission defense teams, etc.”
Marion urged attendees to help bring new people onboard.
“We have a national deficient on folks in our career field,” he said. “We don’t have enough of you, so recruit. If you like the program, recruit. If you don’t like the program let us know so we can fix it.”
During the roundtable attendees shared their thoughts about the career field and provided feedback on areas that could be improved.
“This was a great opportunity, and we all really appreciated Mr. Marion making the time to meet with the AFLCMC COS PAQs,” said Bill Echols, a senior functional lead at the AFLCMC. “He shared his career progression from starting out as PALACE Acquire intern in the intelligence career field to becoming the Air Force Deputy Chief Information Officer. He emphasized the importance of professional development, building a diversity of skills and being prepared to take advantage of opportunities when they come your way.”