Methodology and Acknowledegements

Our report, the third in the Where the Jobs Are series, summarizes the federal government’s most critical anticipated hiring needs—by agency and occupation—from October 1, 2009 through September 30, 2012.

The Partnership for Public Service compiled the job data from 35 federal agencies that employ 1,000 or more workers. We asked the federal agencies to (1) identify their most critical positions to accomplish program priorities; and (2) project future hiring needs in these mission-critical occupations over the next three years.

The data were provided directly by the agencies and supplemented by our review of agencies’ strategic and recruitment plans. In some cases, we also used information from FedScope, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) online database of federal workforce information. In a few instances where agencies were unable to provide hiring projections, we predicted hiring needs based on past experience. Instances where we have done so are footnoted. Unless otherwise noted, all federal workforce statistics in the narrative portion of this report are from FedScope, September 2008 data.

The professional fields listed in each agency profile are from the OPM’s federal classification and job grading system.

The 35 participating organizations include the largest executive branch agencies and one legislative branch agency, the Government Accountability Office. Partial data was supplied for the first time by the intelligence community, including hiring projections for fiscal 2010. The survey participants employ about 99 percent of all full-time, permanent federal workers.

We also included data from our 2009 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings. The Best Places to Work rankings are based on a government-wide survey of federal employees and measure employee satisfaction in each federal agency.

The Partnership thanks all participating agencies that spent time assembling the data for this study and responding to our questions.

We are grateful to our sponsors, Monster Government Solutions and Aon Consulting, for their generous financial support to update and expand this edition of Where the Jobs Are.