Draft PWS - OPS Skills Assessment.docx

Summary of Requirements for OPS Skills Assessments Acquisition The government seeks to acquire access to commercially available, off-the-shelf skills assessments from multiple qualified vendors focusing on various work role skills, number of recruitments, and size of organization being assessed to include knowledge tests, multi-modal, and virtual simulated environments. These assessments will be used to evaluate workforce skills across a range of technical domains. The intent is for the contractor to procure existing assessment products from a variety of vendors, on an as needed basis; the government will not commission, fund, or request the development of new, customized, or modified assessments. Assessments should be section 508 compliant.

Key requirements include:

· Contractor will manage the purchase of the assessments, track the utilization, and track/manage distribution of the assessment results reports from assessment vendors.

· Contractor must offer assessments from a variety of vendors that have established, validated skills assessments that already exist in their product catalog.

· Contractor must provide vendor documentation demonstrating the validity, reliability, and methodological soundness of the assessments.

· Contractor must provide vendor options for licensing or subscription access that allow the government to administer assessments at scale.

· Assessment Vendor Requirements:

· Assessments must cover a variety of skill areas relevant to the federal workforce, such as cybersecurity, IT, software development, data, artificial intelligence, design, product management and other technical skills.

· The government retains full ownership and unlimited rights to all assessment data and analytics outputs.

· Assessments must be deliverable through secure, user-friendly digital platforms.

· Assessments must incorporate multiple item types (e.g., coding tasks, simulations, scenario-based judgment items, hands on lab environments) and provide scalable measurement of proficiency across foundational through advanced levels.

· Assessment support services such as user documentation and technical support must be included.

· Assessments must include reporting capabilities and export mechanisms (CSV, API, etc.) that provide scoring, skill analysis, and aggregated insights suitable for workforce planning as well as results uploading into OPM’s USA Staffing hiring system.

· The assessment platform must support the reliable administration of large‑scale, high‑volume concurrent testing sessions without performance degradation.

· The assessment platform must include robust assessment‑security features (e.g., identity verification, proctoring options, and protections against item exposure).

· No custom content creation, tailoring of assessments, new test development, or modification of underlying assessment methodologies will be considered or accepted under this contract.

· Example assessment vendors include:

· Topic Area - Software Development:

· HackerRank

· CodeSignal

· Codility

· DevSkiller

· Metti

· CoderPad

· CodeGrade

· Topic Area - IT & Cybersecurity:

· NXL Cyber

· CyberStronger (CYBRScore)