Monday Jobs Report
The markets didn’t react well to the Friday Jobs Report from the Labor Department indicating only 80,000 jobs were created in June. While I am not an expert on market analysis, I understand what is going on with jobs and unemployment in Arizona. Phoenix, Arizona and surrounding cities are trending positively while the national average is holding jobs and unemployment at recession rates.
Phoenix is reported as 11th in the nation in jobs creation according to the Phoenix Business Journal; while Arizona is trending with the national average unemployment rate, Phoenix is one percent below. Anecdotally I am seeing job seekers coming through Career Connectors and other job seeker programs and getting placed at a faster rate than in the past three to five years.
Factors impacting jobs, job growth and placement include:
- Skills Gap: CareerBuilder Talent Crunch released a survey indicating 38 percent of employers have open positions for which they have no qualified candidates. Positions for specialized jobs remain open while the market retrains workers for these specialized positions.
- Turnover: Higher turnover of employees who have been employed through the recession. There are jobs available and morale is low so people are on the move. That means long-term job seekers and currently employed workers are competing for the same jobs.
- Layoffs: There are still American workers being laid off so while there are companies surviving the recession they may be doing so by laying people off.
- Jobs are coming….slowly: There are companies hiring in big volume and companies hiring this week. It’s important to set yourself apart from the competition with personal branding, building relationships through in-person and online networking. While there are jobs, the competition is fierce.
- Resources: There are a variety of job seeker resources available from community, places of worship and government sponsors. As with any presidential election year, we don’t know what this type of funding will look like next year. For many organizations there is no funding and they are run by an all-volunteer force; the question remains of how long they can continue without funding.
We see blips of improvement and blips of recession in the jobs numbers released from a variety of sources including the Labor Department. All I know is that it has been a hard fall down and will take a struggle to get us back to where we want to be. It’s nice to see Arizona making a small comeback and I can’t wait to see what the future holds!
Jessica Pierce is Founder and President of Accelerated Team Dynamics, LLC (ATD) a company dedicated to getting employees placed in the right positions in the marketplace by coaching companies as well as candidates. She is also Executive Director of Career Connectors, a community outreach program dedicated to connecting Real People to Real Careers. She is a known speaker, trainer and career transition expert.
Related articles
- The Five Stages of Grief for Job Seekers (jessica-pierce.com)
- Jobs report: More people went on disability than got jobs in June (hotair.com)
