Industry News

On March 17, 2021, the Center for State and Local Government Excellence at ICMA-RC released its issue brief, A Cross-Sector Review of Public Service Employment. The brief provides a comprehensive summary of the U.S. public service workforce including: 1) state and local governments; 2) K-12 schools; 3) hospitals and health care; and 4) social assistance organizations.

According to the brief, there were 43 million workers in the public service sector in 2019. This sector represents 26% of the total U.S. workforce. In addition, the report indicates that the largest projected increase in employment through 2029 is for social assistance organizations, which are expected to increase 25% from 4.1 million to 5.2 million jobs.

The key findings include:

• As compared to the private sector, staff tenures with local and state governments are longer by 3.7 years. Social assistance and health service fields have shorter tenures and high turnover of about 34% in 2019.
• The largest employment category is health care and social assistance with 8.3 million employees.
• Education employment is projected to have minimal growth among local and state governments (0.3% and 1.8%, respectively), while private or nonprofit education employment is projected to increase by 15.4% by 2029.
• In health care, the employment rates for local, private, and state hospitals are more comparable (all between 4.5% and 5.2% growth), while services that are more exclusively private or nonprofit based (i.e., nursing and residential care and ambulatory healthcare services) are projected to have greater increases (10.5% and 18.5%, respectively) by 2029.

The data is based on information derived from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets. 

The brief is available here.