Last year, for the first time since the pandemic in 2020, the total number of people working in Wyoming dropped. That’s one of the findings of this year’s Wyoming Workforce Annual Report. It also found there might not be enough workers in the state to fill new jobs in coming years. Michael Moore is a research supervisor in the Department of Workforce Services. He broke down the report’s findings with Wyoming Public Radio’s Nicky Ouellet.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Michael Moore: We really saw some moderate job losses in the second half of 2025, and I think a lot of that has to do with the construction sector. Really, since the pandemic and really a couple years before, a lot of Wyoming's job growth has been driven by construction. Sometimes when that happens, those are temporary jobs that are associated with pipeline or wind farm construction. So when those projects are complete, the jobs go away, and I think that's part of what happened in 2025.
We think we didn't have any large-scale job losses, and I think we just saw the completion of these larger products like pipelines and road construction. With the ongoing construction projects and everything else around the state, we've seen a little more of an increase in 2026. It doesn't look like that's something that's continued into the new year.
Obviously, one of the big challenges Wyoming has faced over the last several years is continued job losses in mining, which includes oil and gas and coal and all of that. Employment in our mining sector peaked in fourth quarter [of] 2008, and since then really has just gone down. As of fourth quarter [of] 2025, which was the most recent quarter we've published data, employment was about 15,000. That's basically about half the jobs that we had at our peak in 2008.
Nicky Ouellet: A smaller area of job loss is federal government jobs in Wyoming decreased by about 260. Is that the result of DOGE cuts?
MM: I think so. We don't know enough to go down to the individual level like that, but I really think that is the first time we've noticed it. Local government's a little different, but federal and state government stays flat, maybe adds some jobs here and there. [So] that was the first kind of losses that we've seen in federal government in a while
NO: The brain drain issue of young people leaving Wyoming when they're ready to start their careers, that's not new. You've been looking specifically at millennials over the past decade or so. What's standing out to you about millennials in the workforce in Wyoming?
MM: One trend we've really noticed since the 2015-2016 economic downturn, when energy prices just crumbled, [is that] a lot of millennials left Wyoming during those couple of years. At that time, millennials were between the ages of 19 and 34, so that's really the age where a lot of workers are just entering the workforce or they're just starting their careers, or maybe they're getting that first promotion.
So while our economy was struggling in 2016, all of our surrounding states had strong, growing economies. People who couldn't find work here very well could easily pick up and move to any number of states, and some of the states around us were just growing like crazy, Colorado and Utah and Idaho in particular. Since then, millennials have just really continued to leave Wyoming and its workforce.
I've started looking at the number of baby boomers, too, and those first baby boomers turned 62 in 2012. Sixty-two is the first age where people can start taking retirement, and you can just see from that point how the number of baby boomers working in Wyoming has just plummeted consistently.
NO: Yeah, and then pair that with the millennials who are now in their mid-30s, early 40s, prime time working [age], and they're just not here.
MM: And they're not here. So what does that do? Does that leave a skills gap for Gen Z to have to then pick up? Or Gen X, [which] was a smaller generation as it was. There were just fewer of us. And so where do you find those workers if the millennials aren't here and Gen Z isn't ready to step into some of those jobs?
That's when you have Wyoming employers going to other states trying to find, maybe millennials from other states, maybe Gen X from other states. But we have such a loss of the millennials here who are in those prime working years that it's really scary how many of them have left over the last six or seven years.
NO: You do have some projections about the number of jobs Wyoming's expected to add in the next couple years: 6,000 between 2025 and 2027. Do you have a sense of what sectors those jobs will be in and if employers will actually be able to find workers for them?
MM: More recently than that, we've prepared long-term projections for 2024 to 2034, and those projections show us that we're adding about 28,000 jobs from 2024 to 2034, which is a 9.9% increase in jobs. Those projections are based a lot on historic trends, with more weight given to more recent years.
The industries where we were projecting to see a lot of those [increases are in] healthcare and social assistance, which is almost 4,000 new jobs, an 11% increase; accommodation and food services, which is part of that tourism sector, almost 4,000 new jobs, an 11.6% increase; and construction with about 3,700 new jobs, or 15.6%.
That construction could boom at any moment, because we know that all of these large-scale construction projects going on across the state with nuclear power and with data centers and all these kinds of things, that could come in and shake things up at any time. So [those projections] may be on the light end of things.
The other thing projections cannot account for are things like economic downturns, a global pandemic and things like that. If something like that were to happen again, it would certainly shake things up and [is] something we can't account for with that.
As far as finding the workers, that's a tricky question, and that's one that Wyoming's leaders and industry people are really trying to understand. Where are those workers going to come from? I know there's a lot of effort within the different colleges to train people. The state has efforts to retain people, bring people back. And so I know that's certainly a question on people's mind.
It's hard to say. We can project jobs and what kind of growth we're going to see there, but whether the people will be here to fill those jobs, and will they be the people that have the right types of skills available, we just don't know.
Really, just about all jobs are projected to have substantial openings over the next 10 years because, in addition to growth, our projections also take into consideration things like the number of job openings due to people leaving the workforce, which are called exits, or the people changing careers or occupations, which are called transfers. So job growth is really just a small part of those total openings, because there's always that churn of people changing jobs or leaving the workforce or coming into the workforce.
NO: Do you have a sense of if those training programs that you mentioned are actually getting people into the workforce faster?
MM: Our projections include things like typical requirements to enter the job, such as education, training and experience. So if a person is trying to decide, ‘Hey, I want to get into the workforce pretty quick. I just want to maybe get a one-year certificate,’ then go on our website and go to the projection section.
You can look at which of those jobs are projected to have the largest number of openings and what the wages are going to be like.
For example, when we talk about occupations requiring a post-secondary non-degree award, a certificate, the big one is always heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers. We're projected to have more than 8,300 total openings over the next 10 years.
Some other ones that require a post-secondary certificate, but not necessarily a degree, with a large number of job openings are things like teaching assistants, bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, and then nursing assistants.
