This database allows you to search abstracts of open U.S. Federal
Government Jobs. This database is updated every Tuesday through
Saturday at about 9:30 am Eastern U.S. time.
The FedWorld Federal Job Search uses files created by the Office
of Personnel Management in Macon, Georgia. This data is gathered
from hundreds of human resource offices in the government. FedWorld
downloads source files from the FJOB system. The FJOB system has
a series of very well thought out search tools, including by series,
by grade, by state, browse by series and for Merit Promotion jobs.
If you require complex searching of this data, we highly recommend
FJOB at http://www.usajobs.opm.gov/.
Each Job Announcement on FedWorld has a link to the same announcement
at USAJOBS, in case the USAJOBS announcement also contains the complete
vacanacy announcement. OPM
also maintains handy tables that list the GS
Pay Rate Schedules.
Please note that FedWorld doesn't control this data and it's our
observation that many Federal job announcements don't make into
this database - and many agencies have their own job web sites.
The FJOB source files are indexed into a Wide Area Information
Server (WAIS) database. Most casual searchers should be able to
fill out the form and get off and running pretty quick, but here
are a some comments:
Phrases must be in quotation marks (" "). The operators ADJ (adjacent),
AND, OR and NOT can be used, but must be capital
letters. For example: "computer specialist" OR "scientist". Word
roots can be searched using an astersik (*) following the word stem.
For example: spec* will retrieve both special and specialist.
Try simple job title words: computer, janitor, auditor, etc. However
the government can come up with some interesting job titles, so
you might want to be creative in what search terms you use. The
"*" wild card character works great for this: for instance, scien*
will fetch scien science sciences scientific and scientist.
While many job areas will only have one or two listings, others,
will have dozens. In these cases, try adding a second word - computer
adjacent specialist - to narrow the search.
Series numbers: for every job title, OPM
assigns a number to it. You can always tell if you are with a bunch
of Federal workers when you hear them talk about series numbers.
"I used to be a 0335, but I moved to 0334 a year ago." You can browse
a list of series numbers/job titles to
find a number.
To do a series search, just search for the series number. Doing
a search on 1550 will find you all of the computer scientist positions,
for instance (and perhaps other positions that might have 1550 in
a contact phone number!).
Series and Grades: If you REALLY know how the Government personnel
system works, you can get quite fancy and also search on a series
and a specific grade (a grade is at what level most government employees
salaries are set at. Grades are numbers 1 through 15). To do this,
do a search like:
1550 [adjacent to] 15 or "1550 15"
This would find all computer scientist positions posted at the
grade 15 level.
Currently, the state search doesn't work all that well - specially
for specific states - VA, WA,
OR, CO
- are trouble states for this service. This database is a full text
search - every search looks for the word in every bit of every announcement.
That means if you search for VA,
you are going to find a lot of announcements from the Department
of Veterans Affairs because they start their announcement numbers
with VA! Also many announcements are missing state abbreviations.
Sigh. We suggest that you search on large city names in these cases.
Otherwise, hang in there and hopefully we can find a technical fix
in the near future!
Viewing announcements in a remote window is a powerful feature
for users who have access to large, hi-resolution, monitors.
When this option is selected, once the hit list is returned, selecting
any of the announcements will open a new web browser window with
the contents of the announcement. Selecting a different announcement
from the hit list will display the new announcement in the second
window. This allows users to quickly browse through a hit list without
having to use the back button to return to the hit list.
For real power users, there is yet a third option:
searching from a third remote window! This option is available
from the hit list page if you have selected to view announcements
in a remote window. Selecting this link will open a third browser
window that contains the normal search dialog. Conducting a search
from this new window will send a new hit list to the original window.
This site is managed by the National Technical
Information Service (NTIS) http://www.ntis.gov
For assistance or alternate formats please send
an email to: helpdesk@fedworld.gov
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