Yes, job-seeking ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for has come! The 2009 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government, published by the Partnership for Public Service, has just come out and you won't believe who's on top! Unless, of course, you looked at the 2007 edition of Best Places to Work, in which case, you'll probably know the answer already.

For those of you, like me, who might have been previously unfamiliar with this particular Who's Who of government job surveys, allow me to give a quick brief about what Best Places to Work is. The survey gets distributed to a “stratified random sampling” of around 417,000 federal government employees by the Office of Personnel Management. Using a set of 53 questions in 10 different categories (such as Employee Skills/Mission Match, Pay and Benefits, and Work/Life Balance), they take the responses and then sends them to the Partnership for Public Service, who uses a statistical analysis developed by the Hay Group (the most trusted name in job evaluation) in order to come up with an agency index. Then, each agency is put in a Large, Small, or Subcomponent class and the agency indexes in each class are compared against each other. Now, for the results!

Large Agencies (2000+ full-time employees)

These are the heavy hitters. The big tunas. The king shish-kebabs. You get the picture. Anyways, for the second survey running, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission nabs the top spot, with a chart-topping index of 80.7. For those of you who followed the 2007 Best Places to Work survey, you may notice the Securities and Exchange Commission is no longer in the top 10. I'll leave why to rampant speculation.

1) Nuclear Regulatory Commission
2) Government Accountability Office
3) National Aeronautics and Space Administration
4) Intelligence Community
5) Department of State
6) Environmental Protection Agency
7) Department of Justice
8) General Services Administration
9)  Social Security Administration
10) Department of Commerce

Small Agencies (Fewer than 2000, more than 100 full-time employees)

These are the 8th-spot hitters, the slightly smaller mackerels, the viscount shish-kebabs. Two of the 2007 top ten did not submit data to be used in the survey, so the top spot of 2009 went to a newcomer: the Surface Transportation Board. Here are your Small Agency top 10.

1) Surface Transportation Board
2) Overseas Private Investment Corporation
3) Congressional Budget Office (tie)
3) Office of Management and Budget (tie)
5) National Science Foundation
6) Federal Maritime Commission
7) National Transportation Safety Board
8) Commodity Futures Trading Commission
9) Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
10) Federal Trade Commission

Most Improved Agencies

Which agencies saw the greatest increases in overall worker happiness from 2007? Do rhetorical questions only serve to heighten anticipation? Who framed Roger Rabbit? One of these questions is answered below.

1) Small Business Administration (up 30.1%)
2) Federal Maritime Commission (up 28.0%)
3) Commodity Futures Trading Commission (up 22.2%)
4) National Endowment for the Arts (up 18.6%)
5) National Transportation Safety Board (up 16.7%)

The Bottom Fives

We'd love to say that government was wonderful and that what really matters was that they tried, like in Little League, and that there are no winners or losers, and cliché after cliché. But we can't. Someone's got to finish dead last, and we know you want to know who it is. So here it is, the bottom 5 large agencies followed by the bottom 5 small agencies. Can you say Schadenfreude, boys and girls?

Large
26) Small Business Administration 
27) Department of Education    
28) Department of Homeland Security
29) National Archives and Records Administration    
30) Department of Transportation

Small
28) Federal Communications Commission 
29) International Boundary and Water Commission
30) Selective Service System
31) Broadcasting Board of Governors
32) Federal Labor Relations Authority

It may be important to note that the Federal Labor Relations Authority finished last out of everyone who submitted results, with an index of 19.5, over 24 points lower than the second lowest in either division. Oh, labor. Can't we all just get along?

Overall, however, it's a great year for government agencies across the board, with 71% of all agencies improving their indexes from 2007, which is an accomplishment in itself. What makes that even more impressive is that 2009 was the first survey to feature an “Effective Leadership” category of questions, meaning that the addition of government bosses improved scores (either that or every other category saw a huge improvement).

Of course, if you want to see the full results firsthand, as well as an ability to compare various agencies against each other or sort the results by category or even demographics, you can head on over to bestplacestowork.org. There you can view the results for all 278 agencies and subcomponents and even find out more about specific agencies you might be interested in working for.