How's Your Government Accounting & Marketing ?

When your neighbor loses her job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression. When federal workers not only keep their jobs but see their pay rise during a recession, it's a sign of the times. And when your home real-estate taxes have risen 18% during the period called the greatest recession and the city tax gets raised I'm ready to ask the federal government to make some layoffs and take some paycuts? How about you? Our state of Ohio employees have taken about a 5% cut but our unionized teachers got raises. let's post a few facts on how painful this great recession has been for the federal government employee vs the private sector employees.

USA Today:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

Since June, the federal government has increased employment by almost 10 percent, while the private sector has cut employment by over 6 percent over the prior two years of decline.

Now you know why I've been advising many students to seek careers in government for over 5 years.

My advice for financial students? Start learning government accounting and tax law. My advice for State and Federal Government? Start hiring those marketing majors. You need someone who could sell Ice to Eskimos' The government worker in this video couldn't sell water in the desert. Start working on those Taxes Are US slogans.

As a young BBA about 40% of our Business School was Accounting majors. When private and public sector recruiters came on campus all us Beta Alpha Phi folks lined-up for the Big 8 CPA firms. Alias, for those of us who were finance majors too, Investment Bankers didn't come to WMU back in 1976. The only government jobs we thought might provide some stability and be cool were for the FBI and CIA. Frankly, we had no required government accounting classes within the core program -there was no need. All of my professors were CPA's and PhD's. I don't recall any of them had worked in government accounting.

It's time to start signing up for any and all government related classes.

After looking at the chart Scott Heintzelman just found(below)the advice I'd give to college business graduates is and old stock traders motto: The Trend Is Your Friend -start working on government internships and interviews. Remember government will not outsource or offshore itself. In 50 years it's never downsized -the trend has only gone up!