A growing number of industries are seeing job growth as part of a surge in government and private sector hiring in 2018, the Labor Department said Thursday.
The department expects the federal workforce to grow at a modest rate of 1.1% this year.
That’s down from the 1.6% growth seen in the previous three years.
But overall, the number of jobs in each of the sectors is expected to grow by at least 3% this fiscal year, Labor Department economists said.
The growth rate is likely to be lower than in previous years, when job gains averaged nearly 5% annually.
The federal government added nearly 1 million jobs last year, the highest total since 2000, the department said.
But some of those jobs are not currently available, and others have been pushed out of the market because of a variety of factors, including a weak economy and an influx of illegal immigrants.
Overall, the federal government is projecting a 1.5% increase in federal jobs in 2018.
Federal workers are likely to gain the most in their home states, as states have already gained more than 10% in hiring in recent years, the Department of Labor said.
That includes hiring for new jobs in the energy sector and construction and maintenance.
Among the new hires will be engineers, accountants, nurses and others who will be needed to make key decisions related to health care, the health care administration said in a statement.
Job growth is expected in a number of other sectors.
Government workers are expected to gain more than 1% in their states, while public school teachers are expected a 0.9% increase.
In addition, there will be about 2 million fewer government jobs in 2019 than in 2018 in construction, the administration said.
The agency expects more than 600,000 government workers to be lost in 2019.
