MW Federal jobs went from reliable to risky overnight. Here's where Americans can find stable work now - and in the future.

By Venessa Wong, Andrew Keshner and Aarthi Swaminathan

No job is disruption-proof, but these industries are projected to grow over the next decade

Aaron Satyanarayana had always dreamed of working for the federal government in Washington, D.C., despite the distance from his home state of Oregon.

A keen interest in public service and financial inclusion drew the 26-year-old to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal government agency that monitors how banks and other big companies treat consumers, where he did an internship and later returned as a full-time employee in 2023.

Many federal workers like Satyanarayana embraced government work because of one key perk that other industries could not provide: stability.

Yet on Feb. 13, Satyanarayana was suddenly let go, along with at least 100 CFPB employees, before a judge paused further terminations. Their firings were part of the Trump administration's aggressive efforts to reduce the federal workforce with the goal of slashing government spending, led by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The layoffs called into question the fundamental assumptions behind Satyanarayana's and others' career choices. "Part of our social contract with everybody who becomes a civil servant is that we will provide you stability and long-term benefits," Satyanarayana told MarketWatch. "When that is broken, that undermines the entire fabric and thread of not only career decisions for new generations of people - who are talented, brilliant, hardworking and dedicated - who would want to go into government, but it also puts at risk the current federal workforce."

If Satyanarayana still wants career stability and long-term benefits, he'll have to look elsewhere. The same goes for the more than 200,000 federal workers now being shown the door.

These industries are projected to grow over the next decade

The good news is that stable jobs exist, according to Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. The bad news, she said, is that she doubts all the laid-off federal workers will be able to land one of those jobs immediately.

A stable job is one with consistent demand and even-keel growth through the years, she said. By that measure, jobs in accounting, legal work and logistics support - such as dispatchers and supply-chain specialists - are stable. All of those sectors have more job openings than they did before the pandemic. Additionally, a range of jobs related to the healthcare industry are also growing.

Over nine in 10 federal workers are knowledge workers who rely on their white-collar expertise, Shrivastava said. That can cross over to the private sector - but not always. "Someone can't go from being an IT developer for the government to being a nurse," she noted.

Looking at the job market as a whole, the number of job postings in once-hot areas like software development, IT work, marketing, human resources and banking have cooled. Many laid-off federal workers "are probably going to have a hard time being reabsorbed in the labor market," Shrivastava said.

While there are almost 23% more accounting job postings now than there were before the pandemic, there are 35% fewer software-development job postings, Indeed data shows.

Despite high-profile companies such as Meta $(META)$, Starbucks $(SBUX)$ and JPMorgan $(JPM)$ announcing layoffs this year, many employers outside of the federal government are not resorting to large job cuts now, and many people are staying put in their current jobs, Shrivastava said. Employers may be wary of scrambling to find staff again after the so-called great resignation of 2022 had workers job-hopping with abandon, while workers may not be as certain about their job prospects.

"I think there's a little bit of scarring left over," she said.

Another avenue is state and local government work. There were 20.6 million people working in these jobs in January, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that also count jobs in local school districts. That tally exceeds its February 2020 level by more than 500,000 jobs, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.

"While no job is disruption-proof, industries like healthcare, engineering, accounting and legal sectors are projected to grow over the next decade, offering steady employment and hiring demand," said Nicole Gable, the incoming president of LHH Recruitment Solutions, North America.

From 2022 to 2032, there are projected to be nearly 55,000 job openings each year for medical and health service managers, Gable said. Other jobs with solid futures include mechanical and industrial engineers and information-security analysts.

As Gable sees it, job stability "often means predictability - consistent demand, reliable pay and long-term viability." But if a "stable" job lacks chances for advancement, engagement and flexibility, a person's career may languish, she added.

"The key is to find roles that offer both security and the chance to develop valuable, future-proof skills," Gable said. "In today's job market, adaptability and professional development are just as crucial as stability itself."

Outside of government, work has been unstable for most Americans

The sudden upheaval for federal workers "is actually a very normal state of affairs for anybody in the private sector - it's just a very different state of affairs for the government," Louis Hyman, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told MarketWatch.

While mass layoffs are "nothing new" in the context of labor history over the last 50 years, this is the first time workers in the federal government - which, he noted, has been "an important place for the Black middle class to develop over the last 60 years" - have been targeted so aggressively, he said.

From the archives (December 2021): 'Representation at the table': Can state and local governments attract the next generation of Black talent?

The layoff rate for all nonfarm workers has generally fluctuated between 1% and 2% since 2000. Yet for federal workers, the layoff rate has tended to be much lower, rarely approaching 1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While BLS was not able to provide historical data covering the time period, Hyman told MarketWatch there was an era of strong job stability for about 25 years after World War II. At the time, "there was a general sense that America was growing and wages were rising. The borders were closed, so there wasn't any kind of competition for workers."

For certain American workers, that was a "golden era," he said, "but we haven't lived that way for a very long time."

Outside of government work, "that story of security is really all gone in the United States," according to Hyman. In the 1970s and 1980s, deindustrialization led many private-sector workers to lose their jobs. The 1980s also saw General Electric Chief Executive Jack Welch regularly lay off the company's lowest-performing 10% of workers - not in response to any financial downturn, but as a management strategy. Then the white-collar workforce was hit by corporate downsizing in the 1990s.

"We had a choice," Hyman said. Rather than maintaining the stability experienced in the post-World War II era, political and business leaders "doubled down on insecurity," shedding workers to improve the bottom line and serve investor interests. And as work for the average American became more insecure, the wealthiest Americans "got a greater share of the money."

How workers can prepare for even more job instability in the future

Stephan Meier, a professor at Columbia Business School, does not expect mid-20th-century job stability to return. "The half-life of skills is getting so short that you have to constantly learn new things, pivot, change [and] reskill," either within an organization or independently, he said. "People are going to zigzag around from one position to another, from one role to the other, because the pace of change is much more accelerated."

Sector-specific know-how - like an engineer's ability to harness artificial intelligence, or a lawyer's capacity to be a skilled negotiator - remains necessary, Gable said. But changing market demands also make "soft skills" all the more important, she added. Those include "adaptability, problem-solving, creativity and emotional intelligence."

Some employers, such as Mastercard $(MA)$, have programs that allow workers to spend time on short-term projects outside of their regular responsibilities, which helps them acquire new skills and connect with more colleagues.

"People within an organization need to be able to move around relatively flexibly" as new opportunities come, Meier said. As technology like AI is set to disrupt industries, employers can help employees adapt if they "have a system in place that matches the right opportunities to the right people."

The rapid pace of change in the workforce isn't categorically negative, Meier noted, as it opens up benefits for people to try different roles over the course of their careers. But "it makes it potentially a little harder, because there is no clear career path."

That's certainly the case for people who want to help the government carry out its day-to-day functions, as Satyanarayana sees it. "Jobs in the federal civil service are more unstable now than ever," he said.

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-Venessa Wong -Andrew Keshner -Aarthi Swaminathan

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February 27, 2025 08:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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