John Berry, director of the federal Office of Personnel Management.

(CNSNews.com) -- John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), praised new government programs where students and recent graduates can be “hired into the federal family,” during a speech on Tuesday entitled,  “Why It’s Cool to Work for the Federal Government,” at a NASA educational summit in Chantilly, Va.

Berry also said that working for the government is “cool” because “the scale of your impact is greater than anywhere else you can be engaged and involved.”

When speaking about OPM and NASA’s partnership to simplify student-access programs to the federal government, Berry explained that the new initiatives are being unveiled through NASA’s One Stop Shopping Initiative (OSSI).

“We got a lot of advice from students, from university presidents, administrators and associations and we decided to come up with three clean pathways to join the federal government,” Berry said.

“And we are issuing these regs this year,” he said.  “The first is to create an internship program.  From now on there will just be one program, you will get credit for your hours.  You do a good job and you accumulate enough hours you can convert into the civil service.”

Berry continued:  “And so, if you’re in school, no matter where you are, undergrad, graduate, or in school, you’re an intern.  If you have just graduated from school we’re gonn’a have a new program called the Recent Graduate Program.”

“Recent grad, you are a recent grad now, and you will have a two-year opportunity to be hired in to the federal family, for any job for which you are reasonably qualified,” he said.

“We’re going to remove the degree and job linkage, because what we want to provide here was an opportunity for people who just couldn’t compete based on experience.  Why?  They’re just getting out of school.  They don’t have the experience on their resume yet.”

“So we need to give them that window of opportunity to compete for federal employment, where they can come in, prove their stuff, and if they do over the two years, they can be converted into the permanent federal civil service family,” Berry said.

Berry was the keynote speaker at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s second annual Education Stakeholders’ Summit held in a Washington suburb.  The head of the OPM, which oversees about 2 million federal employees, spoke about ways to attract young people to federal employment through the “cool factor.”

“Every infrastructure needs a foundation,” says the OSSI on its Web site.  “The Summit will explore ways in which STEM organizations can be known as a cool place to work. This ‘cool factor’ can serve as an excellent foundation for attracting, retaining, and developing the STEM workforce.”

STEM refers to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the major occupational fields that the NASA campaign is highlighting.

"If you want to have the broadest reach and do the most good, for the most people, the federal government is one of the places you should think about," Berry said in advising attendees to reach out to students.

"You need to think about it," he said, "because the scale of your impact is greater than anywhere else you can be engaged and involved."