Education and health services is now America's largest private employment sector — bigger than professional services, bigger than trade and logistics. Every other industry is competing for workers in its wake
In January 2010, education and health services employed 18.59 million Americans. In April 2026, it employed 26.56 million — an increase of nearly 8 million jobs, or 42.8%, over 16 years. It has grown in almost every single month of that period. It grew through the financial crisis, through the pandemic, and it is growing now, through a wave of AI-driven contraction in the rest of the economy. It is not merely a defensive sector; it is the most consistently expansionary sector in the American labor market.
It is also, by the ADP data, the largest private employment sector in the United States by seasonally adjusted headcount — larger than professional and business services, larger than trade, transportation, and utilities throughout the entire 16-year dataset. When the April 2026 ADP report showed that education and health services added 61,000 jobs in a single month — representing more than half of all private sector job creation — it was not an anomaly. It was the continuation of a 16-year trend.
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The challenge this creates for HR professionals outside healthcare is concrete and growing. A sector that adds 8 million workers over 16 years is absorbing a significant share of the available nursing, administrative, allied health, counselling, and support workforce. HRD has reported that healthcare and life sciences was the sector most likely to report talent shortages, with 77% of employers in the sector struggling to fill roles. Those shortages are intensifying, not easing: the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce has projected that without significant increases in educational attainment, nursing and teaching will be among the most severely shortage-affected occupations through 2032.
The spillover effects on other sectors are real and underappreciated. The administrative and support roles that healthcare requires — medical secretaries, billing coordinators, patient services representatives — are drawn from the same labor pool as office administration roles in every other industry. When a hospital system in a mid-sized market is expanding and competing actively for those workers, the accounting firm across the street is competing for the same candidates.
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HRD has reported that HR skills — including employee management, retention, training, and development — now appear in more than a quarter of all job postings across sectors, including retail, hospitality, and project management. The crossover between healthcare administrative demand and general office labor demand is one of the primary reasons the "talent shortage" narrative has persisted even in a labor market that is supposed to favor employers.
Healthcare's growth is your problem too
For HR leaders in non-healthcare industries, several implications follow. Investment in compensation benchmarking against healthcare employers — not just industry peers — is increasingly necessary in markets where the two sectors compete for similar workers. Retention strategies that emphasize the distinctive benefits of non-healthcare work — career variety, industry exposure, remote flexibility — need to be actively articulated rather than assumed. And workforce planning models that treat healthcare's growth as someone else's problem are likely to be surprised by the compression of the available talent pool in the years ahead.
HRD has also reported that more than 170 occupations face skill shortages by 2032, with teachers and nurses prominently featured. Healthcare's employment growth is the demand side of that forecast. The supply side — educational pipelines, immigration policy, workforce participation rates — has not kept up. HR leaders outside healthcare who have been watching this sector with detachment should start watching it as a competitor.
