The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) climbed to 128.60 in April from a downwardly revised 128.10 in April, and is up 5.1% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The April number was originally reported as 128.22
"In the past six months, the Employment Trends Index has been growing at a 3.5 percent annual rate, which is solid, but slower than the rates of the past two years. We therefore expect employment to grow by about 200,000 new jobs per month, rather than the spectacular 250,000-300,000 we experienced in 2014," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "Given that the labor force is barely expanding, job growth of about 200,000 per month will be sufficient to continue rapidly lowering the unemployment rate."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of its eight components.
The increasing indicators - from the largest contributor to the smallest - were percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, industrial production, real manufacturing and trade sales, number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, initial claims for unemployment insurance, and job openings, 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).
