New Job Market Report from Jobbait Adds New Data

Mark Schill — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:25:26 -0400

Mark Hovind over at Jobbait.com released his monthly job market report, and this month he's expanded it significantly with sector-level data by state and metropolitan area.

Mark offers the numbers in an easily digestible format organized by state in color coded tables. It's a great way to get a feel for what's happening in your region or nationally.

Mark hopes this will help identify sectors with job prospects, even in regions where overall employment is declining.

Looking at total job growth, North Dakota is still the only state showing year-over-year employment growth, followed by Washington, DC.

Fastest declining states by growth rate are Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Oregon.

Fastest declining states by sheer numbers are California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Texas.

See Jobbait.com for the full report.

Deconstructing the Meltdown, National Job Losses by Sector

Mark Schill — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:14:47 -0500

Here's a look at national employment change in the United States over the past 10 years. Nonfarm employment peaked in the US in December of 2007 at 138.1 million jobs. After a record loss of 598,000 jobs in the last month, we're now at 134.5 million. Thats a loss of more than 3.5 million jobs over the past year. Conveniently, 3.5 million jobs is exactly what Obama administration economists plan to create or save with the stimulus package.

If we cut it by sector, recent job losses in manufacturing, construction, and professional and business services are striking. Over this same time period, we've added roughly 4.5 million jobs in education and health and another 2.5 million in government jobs. Perhaps the president is planning to hire those 3.5 million new employees directly?

If we index each sector back to January 1999, we can begin to see the trajectory of each industry over time. For this chart, the height of each line at a given point of time indicates percent growth over the January 1999 level. The heavy black line shows growth for all sectors.

From here, the dot-com bust is obvious, as is the fact that the information sector has not recovered to pre-2000 levels. Information may be even more trouble in the short term, as that sector includes media and publishing.

The construction employment boom began in mid 2003 and eventually reached more that a 20% premium over 1999 before falling back to mid 2003 levels last month.

Manufacturing has fallen precipitously with this bust, we are now seeing marked declines in other goods-supporting industries: wholesale trade and transportation and warehousing.

Again, institutional sectors of Government (up 12%) and eds and meds (up 30%) lead the way. The other fastest growing sector since 1999? Leisure and hospitality. Staycation, anyone?