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Fairfax County: Microsoft stack, cloud and PM/cyber certifications top IT hiring priorities
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Summary
Fairfax County panelists said the county is standardizing on Microsoft Azure, Office 365, SharePoint, Power BI and Power Apps and recommended applicants emphasize cloud, CRM and project-management/cybersecurity certifications; they also warned that automated HR screens favor keyword-matched application fields.
Fairfax County officials on the VLGMA webinar laid out practical hiring priorities for county IT and department-level technology roles.
"We're a Microsoft shop," said Firdal Sakim, information technology director with the Department of Family Services in Fairfax County. "Microsoft Azure, 365, Azure... SharePoint online, Power BI, Power Apps" are technologies the county is actively deploying, he said, and CRM platforms such as Salesforce also appear in departmental rollouts.
Firdal recommended that applicants pursue cloud and platform certifications and highlighted project-management and cybersecurity credentials as especially useful: "PMP... cybersecurity, CISM, CISSP... and then cloud certifications," he said.
He also described the county's multi-step application process and an HR screening system (NeoGov) that searches application fields for keywords; attachments are not reliably parsed by the scanner. "An attachment is almost irrelevant unless somebody pulls it up," Firdal said, advising candidates to type key experience into the application fields and match minimum-qualification language word-for-word.
The county’s advice for applicants: consult Fairfax County’s annual IT plan (posted on the county website) to see the five-year project roadmap and tailor applications to the tools and terms listed there. Department-specific postings may use titles such as "business analyst" for roles that perform core IT tasks, so candidates should read job descriptions closely rather than dismiss positions by title.
The county emphasized soft skills and adaptability as complements to technical credentials, saying candidates should show how they applied tools to solve problems and work with internal customers.
