The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) grew to 132.64 in April from 131.58 in March, and is up 4.1% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
"The Employment Trends Index has been expanding rapidly in 2017, suggesting that robust job growth will continue into the summer," said Gad Levanon, chief economist, North America, at The Conference Board. "A tight labor market is about to get much tighter, with solid employment growth occurring at a time when there is almost no growth in the working-age population."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven of the eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, initial claims for unemployment insurance, industrial production, job openings, number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, and real manufacturing and trade sales, 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).
