The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 128.43 in December from an upwardly revised 127.83 in November, and is up 7.5% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The November number was originally reported as 123.24.
"The Employment Trends Index increased in every single month of 2014, capping the year off with strong growth, 2.3 percent, in the final quarter," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. " The strengthening in the ETI suggests that rapid job growth is likely to continue throughout the first half of 2015. And as the labor market tightens further, acceleration in wage growth is soon to follow."
The gain in ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of its eight components.
The increasing indicators - from the largest positive contributor to the smallest - were percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get", initial claims for unemployment insurance, industrial production, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, number of temporary employees, 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).
