The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) climbed to 128.82 in August from a downwardly revised 127.64 in July, and is up 4.5% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The July number was originally reported as 127.89.
"The large increase in the Employment Trends Index in August suggests that a significant moderation in employment growth is unlikely to occur in the coming months," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "With solid job growth expected to continue, the unemployment rate is likely to go below 5 percent by year's end."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from half 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," percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, number of temporary employees, and industrial production, 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).
