The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index – which forecasts employment for the next 6 months improved, and its authors say “The surprisingly weak job growth in March is mostly noise in an otherwise healthy and tight labor market“.

Analyst Opinion of Conference Board’s Employment Index

Econintersect evaluates year-over-year change of this index (which is different than the headline view) – as we do with our own employment index. The year-over-year index growth rate declined from last month – and wiped out all of the index gains in February. Looking at this index another way – the current rate of growth is about mid-stream of the rates of growth seen since the end of the Great Recession.

Econintersect is forecasting modest improvement to the growth rate six months from now. Note that the Econintersect Employment Index is not based on employment data.

From the Conference Board:

The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) increased in March, after a sharp increase in February. The index now stands at 131.43, up from 131.09 (a downward revision) in February. The change represents a 4.3 percent gain in the ETI compared to a year ago.

“The Employment Trends Index continued to expand in March, suggesting that solid job growth will continue through the spring,” said Gad Levanon, Chief Economist, North America, at The Conference Board. “The surprisingly weak job growth in March is mostly noise in an otherwise healthy and tight labor market.”

March’s increase in the ETI was fueled by positive contributions from six of the eight components. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales, Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers, Industrial Production, Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get,” Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry, and Job Openings.