If you keep an eye on the news, you’ll have noticed that a relatively frequent theme for stories is battles between public sector workers and the government. Generally these stories involve certain groups of public sector workers facing reductions in their pensions or other benefits, or alternatively there being the prospect of cutbacks and redundancies. And these disagreements often seem to lead to another type of story, namely strikes by public sector workers.

All of this angst and aggro tends to obscure what it is that public sector workers actually do. And for young people who are trying to make decisions about their future this can only be bad news. Knowing the full facts of as many different career options as possible is one of the most important ways to make informed choices about your future, and if all people think of when they hear the term “public sector worker” is confrontation, they’ll be less likely to look further into what this line of work involves.

So let’s take a moment to demystify the term “public sector worker.” You might have difficulty visualizing what people who fall into this category do, but in fact according to the broadest definition of the term these people have probably had a bigger role to play in your life than anyone else, with the obvious exception of your family. Because “public sector workers” is in fact the umbrella term we use for anyone who works for an organization run by some level of government, whether that’s your local council or the national government. This means all the staff at your local state schools–including your teachers–and all the people who work in your nearest hospital or GP clinic–including the nurses and doctors–are public sector workers.

But while you obviously know exactly what a doctor, a nurse or a teacher is, these roles only amount to a small proportion of the total number of public sector workers. And even if we include all the other more easily identifiable job roles in the sector–social workers, binmen, librarians, and many others besides–we still won’t have accounted for all of the public sector workers.

This is because much of the work carried out by your local council and national government revolves around office-based work that the public doesn’t see, with the job titles of the people doing it not typically falling into the categories of the most well-known career paths. But for every public sector worker providing a frontline service to the public, there are probably a couple more who are working behind the scenes, doing things like formulating strategies to improve services, doing the administration that makes sure everyone gets paid on time, keeping an eye on budgets or reviewing plans for new building projects.

As you can see, these four behind-the-scenes examples cover a very wide range of activities. And all of them are also things that people do in the private sector (by which we mean companies and businesses). This means that if your thoughts about your career so far have led you to thinking about working within a specific industry–for example, marketing, finance or law–then it’s more than likely that there are opportunities within the public sector part of those industries for you.

So how do you decide whether to try and live out your career ambitions within the public or private sector? This is a quandary that many people find themselves in at some point in their career. And, in fact, there are plenty of people who spend part of their career in the private sector, and part in the public sector.

It’s difficult to generalize about how people decide what is right for them–it depends a lot on the type of job you do–but there are a couple of themes that seem to be common to most areas of work. Whereas in the private sector you can potentially be paid a lot more (budgets are generally more limited within the public sector, and this tends to mean salaries are lower) the attractions of the public sector are twofold.

First, people who work in the public sector tend to cite the feeling of job satisfaction they get from knowing that the organization they work in exists to help the public, rather than operating more according to the principles of profit making. And second, traditionally public sector workers have had a better deal in terms of things like the pension plan they are offered and the number of days of leave they are entitled to. That said, these things are now the subject of review and are becoming less common, bringing us back to the arguments and strikes that we see in the news today!