The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) climbed to 128.93 in January from a downwardly revised 128.71 in December, and is up 1.9% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The December number was originally reported as 129.33.
"The Employment Trends Index rose for the second month in a row, reducing the likelihood of further slowing in employment growth," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "However, the temporary help industry component declined sharply in January, and because it is one of the best leading indicators of employment growth, we will monitor it closely in the coming months."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from five of its eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," industrial production, real manufacturing and trade sales, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, and the ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, according to the Conference Board.
The ETI aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out so-called "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.
The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the ETI include: Percentage of respondents who say they find "Jobs Hard to Get" (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey); Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor); Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation); Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics); Part-time Workers for Economic Reasons (BLS); Job Openings (BLS); Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board); and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis).
