By Shefali J Lakhina, Founder FireUp
The Tour of Duty Rediscovered
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has a message for young Americans: you don’t need to give the government a thirty-year career. Give it a few years. Learn, build skills, bring new ideas, move to the private sector and maybe come back to serve.
OPM Director Scott Kupor has made this case across interviews, most recently on the a16z podcast. He wants more young people to “spend a couple years in government at some point in their career.” It is a smart thesis, based on precedent. It is also why the FireUp Career and Well-being Platform was founded two years ago: to grow career pathways for the fire, forestry and conservation workforce.
FireUp talent and job subscriber data from the past two years confirms that people entering fire and forestry work don’t want a single federal career for life. They want pathways that adapt to their life stage and interests. Yet the government needs this workforce more than ever. The 2025 cuts dismantled the entry pathways, Interior now plans to consolidate further, and wildfire risk keeps growing: 2026 burned about 9.5 million acres, 146% of the ten-year average. How can fire and land management agencies extend OPM’s early-career drive, now led by its U.S. Tech Force, to fire and stewardship?
The early-career paradox
OPM is working hard to bring young people back into government. Kupor wants at least one-third of FY2027 external hires to be early-career and aims to recruit more than 30,000 early-career employees this year. Its U.S. Tech Force is initiating two-year cohorts whose private-sector partners commit to considering graduates for full-time jobs.
Government is now recruiting the way industry does. OPM's new Early Career Talent Network at earlycareers.gov runs on a venture capital maxim: "come for the tool, stay for the network." Sign up once, get matched across agencies. And it isn't only for university graduates. OPM tells agencies to recruit from community colleges, high schools, trade and technical schools, land-grant universities and 4-H, the same places this field has always drawn from. States are building their own versions, statewide talent marketplaces that make skills and credentials portable between employers. FireUp has run this model for fire, forestry and conservation since 2024. FireUp’s job board created the first Talent Network for fire, forestry and conservation, expanding horizons for hundreds of professionals to access employers across ten different industry types.
The urgency to scale this model is real. Nearly half the federal workforce is within ten years of retirement age. But the 2025 cuts fell hardest on the people OPM now wants back. Employees with less than two years of service fell from 16.2% to 10.3% of the federal workforce in a single year. Probationary staff, the newest in their roles, separated at higher rates than everyone else. The share of federal workers under 30 dropped from 8.9% to 7.9%.
We watched this happen in real time. Between January and May 2025, 219 people joined the FireUp Talent Network, 98 of them in April alone. More joined in those five months than in the nine months before. Many were early-career forestry and conservation professionals looking for their next role outside government. It is happening again: since May 2026, more than 100 people have applied, at more than double last year's monthly pace.
Only one door stayed open
In fire, forestry and conservation, the cuts did not land evenly.
Seasonal wildland firefighting was protected, for the most part. Fire personnel were exempt from deferred resignation. The Forest Service met its firefighter hiring goal weeks early, and pay improved, including new hazard pay for prescribed burns.
Almost everything around suppression closed. Paid conservation internships fell 43.8% in 2025. AmeriCorps positions fell 42%. Meanwhile, the number of job seekers per conservation posting rose 40%. Young people kept coming as the doors closed. Roughly 32,000 AmeriCorps members were pulled from service, and the American Climate Corps was wound down. The Forest Service froze non-fire seasonal hiring for trails, recreation and visitor services from fall 2024 until early 2026.
The work suffered too. Forest Service hazardous fuels treatment dropped from more than 4 million acres in 2024 to about 2.6 million in 2025. Prescribed fire was cut roughly in half. Then 2026 burned about 9.5 million acres, 146% of the ten-year average.
The only entry door left fully open led to suppression. The doors into restoration, stewardship, fuels and conservation science, where the talent most wants to go, were the ones that closed.
What this workforce really wants
FireUp's Talent Network and job-alert data over two years (2024-2026) show a workforce that matches OPM's thesis, with some important caveats.
Talent is open to many employer types. Members are interested in jobs from more than six distinct employer types. Private companies lead at 86%. Federal agencies rank sixth, at 72%.
Talent is looking for specific roles. The share of active subscribers tracking named job titles rose from 13% in 2024 to 51% in 2026. Wildland firefighter, hotshot crew, fire lookout, prescribed fire, dispatch and GIS technician top the list.
Talent want technology in their careers. Data science appears in 40% of job-function profiles. More than half of our members want work in science, data or technology, and half of them also want fireline or fuels work. And 43% already list a technology skill, from GIS and remote sensing to data analysis and programming. The demand is there: the State of FireTech 2026 maps 136 companies building fire technology, backed by $917 million in equity since 2020, and they need people who know both the fireline and the data. This generation wants careers that blend the field and the data, not choose between them.
Talent moves between fire and stewardship. About half want both fire or fuels work and forestry or conservation work. Four in five who want to fight fire also want forestry or conservation roles, and three in four with fire experience are looking toward stewardship. That isn't attrition. It's one workforce creating a career portfolio with diverse skills sets and certifications.
They want stability that travels with them. 76% seek healthcare and 56% retirement contributions. And 83% want work where they already live, though 64% would move for the right role.
That last point is where FireUp data can inform OPM's thesis. Mobility alone isn't what this generation is after. Nationally, only 32% of Gen Z workers hold quality jobs, against 40% of all employees, and JFF's Youth Advisory Council puts financial stability from a single job at the top of its definition. They want portable benefits, careers rooted where they live and a path to qualifications that employers recognize. 37% of our members are pursuing relevant training or certification right now. Nearly three in ten are interested in wildland or prescribed fire qualifications, from red cards to burn boss, and nearly one in four are building GIS, data or drone skills. Yet fewer than one in ten names a specific National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) qualification.
From linear pipelines to career portfolios
Fire, forestry and conservation has followed the defense model for the tour of duty. The Civilian Conservation Corps ran its camps through the War Department from 1933 to 1942 and enrolled about three million young men; federal seasonal fire crews were later modeled on it. Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers have trained young people at Forest Service-run campuses since 1964, enrolling more than 3,000 a year. Today more than 150 conservation corps serve about 23,000 corpsmembers a year, and Interior alone fields about 5,700 seasonal firefighters each season. These young people go on to work with state and local agencies, at utilities and mills, and as local contractors. The model still works where it's funded. In 2024-25, at least 1,500 California Conservation Corps members earned a certification or credential, and 184 went into CAL FIRE firefighting.
In 2025 most of these pathways shrank or stalled. AmeriCorps conservation postings fell 42%, the Forest Service froze non-fire seasonal hiring, and the administration moved to close Job Corps centers and has since proposed eliminating the program. Seasonal fire crews were the exception: protected and fully hired.
But the pipeline into the private sector didn't stop. Former federal staff are moving into forest-carbon and climate monitoring startups, at raises estimated at 20–40%, and state agencies, contractors and utilities are absorbing more of the work. The Forest Service alone can call on more than 22,000 contracted firefighting resources from about 2,500 vendors, and it holds 571 Good Neighbor Authority agreements with states, counties and tribes. What the pipeline lost was its federal design. Regional and state builders are now redesigning it from the ground up.
In California's Sierra foothills, Mother Lode Job Training and Columbia College run the Greater Sierra Forestry Corps on a $2.5 million High Road Training Partnership grant. Graduates leave with NWCG fire courses, chainsaw, incident command and safety certifications. The partnership's backers range from CAL FIRE's union local and the Forest Service employees' union to loggers, a timber company and conservation groups. The Watershed Research and Training Center is training nearly 200 local conservation corps members in fire practitioner and chainsaw skills. Its career navigation fellowship nearly doubles participants' odds of advancing in the field, from 20% to 38%. Federal money laid groundwork too. In 2022 a $21.5 million Good Jobs Challenge grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration launched California Resilient Careers in Forestry, a forestry and fire-safety pathway run through the Foundation for California Community Colleges. It spans five community colleges (Butte, Feather River, Lake Tahoe, Reedley and Shasta), works with employers including PG&E and Arbor Works, and points people to training through a career pathways site, forestrypathways.org. This fall it convenes a statewide network of college forestry, natural resources and fire educators; its first session, on November 20, pairs new data on in-demand nature-based solutions jobs with California Natural Resources Agency career pathways. No enrollment, completion or placement outcomes have been published yet.
States are also building the infrastructure to make skills portable. Ten states are semifinalists in the U.S. Department of Education's $15 million Connecting Talent to Opportunity Challenge, including fire-prone Arizona, Montana and Hawaiʻi. They are building statewide talent marketplaces with credential registries, learning and employment records and skills-based job descriptions.
The way forward is to connect these pieces:
Register fire credentials in state systems. NWCG and wildfire mitigation credentials should sit in state credential registries, so a red card earned in a corps follows a worker to a utility, a contractor or the Wildland Fire Service.
Add career navigation to every cohort. The Watershed Center's results show that navigation support nearly doubles advancement.
Give regional programs a federal hiring partner. Programs like Mother Lode's need an agency that commits to hiring their graduates.
OPM's own model points to the fix. Build a Tech Force for the orange and green workforce:
Two-year cohorts that earn NWCG qualifications, not just hours.
Hiring commitments from state agencies, contractors, utilities, FireTech companies and prescribed burn associations.
Portable benefits: healthcare, retirement and mental health support that move with workers between employers.
A guaranteed path back into federal service.
Credit toward OPM's early-career target, so the Wildland Fire Service and land management agencies compete for the same young talent as every other agency.
One caution. Early-career cohorts don't replace the experienced middle. Engine captains, burn bosses and fire management officers take years to develop, and many are nearing retirement. In a 2026 survey of 825 federal fire staff, 71.5% had six or more years of service, 74.4% had considered leaving in the past year and 21% said positions are often filled with under experienced people. The cost is real. The federal investigation released this week into June’s Knowles Fire entrapment in western Colorado, which killed four members of the Rifle Helitack crew, found a dispatch center staffed mainly by trainees and a vacant telecommunications position behind missed weather broadcasts. It was one of 18 fireline deaths this year, as entrapments reached a 20-year high. Every cohort needs structured mentoring from the people who carry that judgment, before they leave.
No single agency or platform can build this alone. A shared architecture needs each level doing its part:
Federal: set the standards. A wildland fire occupation code in the 2028 federal revision, worker access to their own qualification records, a featured fire and land-management pathway on earlycareers.gov and outcome reporting for every federally funded training program, with fire, forestry and mitigation credentials eligible for Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act training dollars.
State: make skills portable. Fire, forestry and mitigation credentials in state registries and learning and employment records, with state agency jobs in the same feeds.
Local: guide people in. Career navigators at community colleges, trade schools, corps, job centers and prescribed burn associations, where people actually start.
Private and nonprofit: commit to hire. Contractors, utilities, FireTech companies and small businesses that post jobs, sign hiring commitments and report outcomes.
Shared rails. One crosswalk, keyed on NWCG qualifications, that maps job series, occupation codes and credentials across fire, forestry and conservation; worker-owned profiles that move between networks with consent, and placement data everyone can see.
The field already knows how to do this. On a fire, interagency dispatch orders a crew from any agency based on qualifications recorded once in a national system. No one re-proves their red card at every incident. We federate resources across federal, state, tribal and contract lines every season. We have never done it for careers.
Today a forester looking for work updates FireUp, earlycareers.gov, USAJOBS, a state jobs portal and a contractor's site, one by one. Credentials fix half of that: verified qualifications the worker holds and carries. The other half is intent, what people want to do next. It should be entered once and read everywhere, with the worker's consent.
These networks should federate, not compete. OPM's network shouldn't replace the networks that already hold workers' trust, including from Work for America's Civic Match, which has placed more than 500 people in state and local government, to niche networks like FireUp. OPM must build the infrastructure that connects existing talent networks.
Where the new Wildland Fire Service fits
The U.S. Wildland Fire Service is the natural home for this idea. Interior created it in 2026 to streamline training, improve recruitment and expand career growth. Its FY2027 budget request covers 17,587 federal wildland fire personnel, with 2,476 full-time equivalents dedicated to fuels management.
It starts with real building blocks:
Pay that competes. The budget fully funds the permanent pay increases for federal and tribal firefighters, and the agency is seeking a permanent waiver of the premium pay cap. The stated aim is to "better compete with private employers."
Housing. The budget includes firefighter housing within a $27 million facilities line.
Apprenticeships and youth pathways. These include the Fish and Wildlife Service's Labor Department-accredited Wildland Fire Apprenticeship Program, the Bureau of Indian Affairs apprentice program and a new Native Youth Firefighter Training Program in six schools across four states.
Local hiring. Fuels and rehabilitation contracts can favor Youth Conservation Corps crews, Public Lands Corps and small businesses that hire or train at least half their workforce locally.
A technology career track in waiting. A new $123.5 million Intelligence and Technology program includes a Wildland Fire Intelligence Center staffed by data, systems engineering and fire behavior experts.
What's needed next is the connective infrastructure. These programs are scattered across bureaus. None carries hiring commitments from the state agencies, contractors and utilities where many trainees will end up. None ties early-career hiring to OPM's one-third target. None offers benefits that travel between employers. And none pairs new firefighters with the experienced leaders about to retire.
The Wildland Fire Service is new enough to design this in from the start. It could run unified two-year cohorts across its bureaus, built on the existing apprenticeships. Fuels and mitigation would be a core track alongside suppression, and the Intelligence Center would serve as a home for the data and technology talent this generation brings. That would make it the first federal agency to build a tour of duty for field work, not just for code.
The policy vehicles are already moving, many backed by Megafire Action:
The Fix Our Forests Act, which the Administration endorsed in August, would create a Wildfire Intelligence Center and implement provisions of the National Prescribed Fire Act.
The Wildfire Response and Readiness Act, introduced in August, includes a workforce title. It improves firefighter pay, leave and retirement, trains the next generation and blocks further firings at land management agencies.
The Wildland Firefighter Health and Safety Act, introduced in September, would codify the Federal Wildland Firefighter Health and Wellbeing Program.
In California, the newly signed Good Fire Act (AB 1699) extends state burn boss certifications from one year to three. SB 973 makes the Wildfire County Coordinator Program permanent and builds local workforce capacity; Megafire Action co-sponsored it. A beneficial fire training program (AB 1891) was vetoed, which leaves a capacity gap a cohort model could fill.
None of these bills yet builds an early-career pathway that crosses employers. That is the piece to add.
Whoever holds the land, the risk stays
The same week the Knowles report came out, Interior released its five-year strategic plan. It commits to "consolidate its workforce," adds staff only for law enforcement and public safety, and offers federal land to states, localities and Tribes for purchase. Other public land is being steered toward energy and data centers, mostly through leases, and it is expected that some transferred land will be resold to private owners.
Each path moves the fire work differently. Transferred land hands fuels and fire duty to governments that need the crews and funding to carry it. Leased land stays federal, so the risk stays with a shrinking federal workforce, while new infrastructure in fire-prone country adds vegetation management work for utilities and contractors. Resold land shifts fire duty to state agencies and private owners across a patchwork of boundaries.
Whoever ends up owning or leasing the land, the wildfire risk stays, and so must the trained workforce to manage it. Every sale, transfer or lease should carry its fuels and fire obligations, with the funding and qualified crews to meet them.
What comes next
No one publishes a jobs report for this field. Stanford researchers found in 2025 that no single system even tracks who works in wildfire response across agencies, and that contractors, tribal crews and volunteers often go uncounted. Like the field's other workforce studies, it counts fire roles alone, not the forestry and conservation workers who move in and out of fire work. Green jobs reports count energy. Federal data counts federal positions. Most published data counts only the people already inside the system. Nobody measures the people trying to get in. The federal count that does exist is small: the core fire, forestry and conservation occupations hold about 151,300 jobs, 0.09% of U.S. employment. Through 2035, prevention and conservation science roles grow faster than the national average, while hands-on field roles shrink.
Next week, FireUp will release the State of Fire, Forestry & Conservation Jobs 2026 report. It is the field's first jobs report, combining FireUp Talent Network and job-alert data with federal, state, private and global labor market analysis. It answers OPM Director Kupor's question of this field: are the right people lined up with the right incentives to make innovation happen? Beneath it sit two tactical questions: where hiring is heading, and whether we have a trained workforce, including the technology skills innovation depends on, to fill the positions.
If you hire, fund, train or set policy for this workforce, follow along. And if you're early in your career and looking for your path into this work, join the FireUp Talent Network at fire-up.net.