The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 119.62 in June from an upwardly revised 119.03 in May, and is up 6.3% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The May number was originally reported as 118.58.
"The rapid increase in the Employment Trends Index in recent months suggests that strong job growth is likely to continue through the summer," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "While the strong labor market signals an improvement in economic growth, the key factor is that the average productivity of workers will need to rise as well."
The gain in ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven its eight components. The increasing indicators - from the largest positive contributor to the smallest - were percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, real manufacturing and trade sales, industrial production, number of temporary employees, percentage of respondents who say they find jobs hard to get, job openings, and 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).
