Friday, December 18, 2009

Biggest Employer in HoCo

An anonymous commenter on this post suggested that the Howard County Public System was the largest employer in the county. While the school system is certainly ONE of the largest employers, they are not THE largest. Howard County’s largest employer is by far Johns Hopkins. The hospital, which is part of the Johns Hopkins Health System, employs 1,720 people and the Applied Physics Lab in Fulton employs 4,300 people for a total of 6,020 employees. This does not even take into account people working for the School of Continuing Studies in Columbia Gateway or the Dorsey Center in Hanover.

The Howard County Public School System has approximately 4,500 employees.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

HCPSS has about 7800 employees

(I work for them and was in a meeting recently with the guy who's in charge of payroll when the subject came up)

wordbones said...

Anon 10:45,

My reference for this post is the Howard County Economic Development Agency from a report published in Mrach of 2008. Here's the link.

Skip to page 6.

-wb

Anonymous said...

That number refers to the number of teachers rather than the total number of employees and is incorrect, even in March of 2008. Again, the current number is about 7800 who are currently on the payroll.

HCPSS's count at http://www.hcpss.org/aboutus/factcard.pdf lists 4600+ TEACHERS but doesn't include custodial, grounds or maintenance personnel, as well as Central Office and other employees.

Anonymous said...

Ditto to the 7800 number for total employees for HCPSS.

Anonymous said...

7300+ according to the HCPSS website

http://www.hcpss.org/employment/

Anonymous said...

Your number is teachers only, as you probably have surmised by the other posts.

wordbones said...

nuff said...

I get it. I defer to the numbers from the HCPSS website. Still, I suspect that JHU is a close number 2.

Thank you commenter's all for showing me the error of my ways...

-wb

Anonymous said...

APL is number two, you are correct on that one.

Anonymous said...

And, you could also say that APL is the largest private employer in the county....