Jay Joyner: Giving Back to the Profession That’s Given Him So Much

Jerome “Jay” Joyner was an experienced public servant long before he actually entered the public sector.

“I came to public sector HR by way of healthcare administration and the hospital floor,” says Joyner, who has served as the director of HR for the City of Hyattsville, Md. since October 2022.

“I started my career in healthcare administration, and to better understand the clinicians I was leading, I went to nursing school,” continues Joyner, a registered nurse who earned his RN designation via the Roxborough Memorial Hospital School of Nursing.

“Over the years, my work spanned trauma, nephrology and gerontology, both at the bedside and in leadership roles overseeing multi-site operations and teams.”

Joyner served in a number of capacities in the healthcare industry over the course of more than 25 years. Those positions included a registered nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a charge nurse, an assistant administrator with Accord Health Services, a facility administrator and group operations manager with DaVita Kidney Care in Bel Air, Md., an area director with US Renal Care, where he oversaw an $18 million annual budget and more than 100 employees, and chief operating officer of Arundel Ambulatory Surgery Center.

Joyner also holds a bachelor’s degree in health administration and a master of health administration, with a concentration in human resources, from the University of Baltimore. Spending more than a quarter-century working in healthcare helped him discover that HR was where he belonged in the long run.

“Somewhere along the way I realized the part of the job I enjoyed most wasn’t the budgets or the regulatory surveys,” he says.

“It was the people work—investigations, labor relations, workforce planning and making sure employees were treated fairly and held to clear standards. That led me to earn my master’s in employment law and, in 2022, to become HR director for the City of Hyattsville.”

(Joyner earned his Master of Legal Studies, with a concentration in human resources and employment law, from Arizona State University in 2021.)

Upon moving into public sector HR, Joyner quickly learned that, “while the fundamentals of HR travel well, the public sector has its own language—civil service rules, public accountability, elected officials, open records and collective bargaining in a political environment.”

Joyner became a PSHRA member in June 2024, because “I wanted to learn from people who had been doing this work far longer than I had, and because I believe public HR professionals do our best work when we share what we know rather than reinventing it in every jurisdiction.”

The organization has given Joyner exactly that, he says, in the form of practical resources, a network of like-minded colleagues with whom to share ideas and serve as a sounding board, and the PSHRA-SCP credential, which he earned in January 2026.

“The association made me a better public sector HR leader, and I want to help do the same for the next person making the transition,” says Joyner, who is currently president-elect of PSHRA’s Patuxent River Basin Chapter.

In the days ahead, he looks forward to continuing his growth as a public sector HR leader.

“Hyattsville has shown me how much the fundamentals matter in building public trust—fair and transparent compensation, sound investigations and practices that hold up to scrutiny from employees, elected officials and residents alike.

“My goal is to keep strengthening those foundations in public service, while expanding my own expertise in areas like labor relations and HR policy, so I can bring even more value to the organization I serve,” adds Joyner.

Joyner puts just as much emphasis on developing the next generation of public sector HR professionals, and he hopes to help others transitioning to government work “get up to speed faster than I did.”

In the near-term, “that means serving the Patuxent River Basin Chapter well as president-elect, and, when the time comes, as president, and continuing to find ways to give back to the profession that has given me so much.”