For the second month in a row, the Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index increased in October. The index now stands at 128.97, up from 128.29 in September, and up one percent year-on-year.
“The Employment Trends Index increased moderately in recent months, suggesting solid job growth will continue through early 2017,” says Gad Levanon, chief economist, North America, at The Conference Board. “The moderation in the ETI’s pace of growth in recent months is typical, given the maturing of the labor market, and does not signal a significant slowdown in job growth.”
In calculating its Employment Trends Index, The Conference Board aggregates eight labor-market indicators that it considers accurate in their own areas. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out “noise,” revealing underlying trends more clearly. The indicators come from the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Board and other sources.
The Conference Board attributes October’s improvement in the ETI to positive results from seven of the eight components. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Industrial Production, Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry, Job Openings, Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get,” Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales, and Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers. Also included in the index is Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, reported by the U.S. Department of Labor.