April 11, 2003

Uncle Sam wants YOU - for a desk job
Posted by deisenhart@bostonworks.com">Douglas Eisenhart at 4:28 PM -

Federal recruiters are out in force these days, not just for the military, but for the desk jobs that make the government run. While the rest of the economy shrank last year, the feds added a whopping 160,000 people to the payroll:

Just one out of five young college graduates is interested in government work. And, in 5 years more than half of the civil service will be eligible to retire -- and that has left federal agencies scrambling to replace them. So, recruiters are working hard to raise the profile of government work. But sometimes, it can be a hard sell. And, even for those who do join up, 30 years of solid work before the pension kicks in seems like a very long time. Bush is looking to open up a third of civil service jobs to private competition in the future -- to make those jobs more attractive.

All this from PRI's Marketplace radio show. To hear the segment, go to the Marketplace archive page for April 4th, then scroll down to the piece entitled "Grads for Government" and click on the audio link. Happy listening, Future Bureaucrats of America (that's FBA to you).

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