A new look at the Jobs key measure
Minnesota Compass has revised the Jobs key measure in the Economy section. Compass researcher Allison Churilla answers questions about the changes and the reasons behind them, and points out some key learnings we can glean from the revised measure and accompanying breakdowns by geography.
Q: What’s changed?
A: We decided to rely more heavily on total jobs averaged over the year and to reduce the number of charts relying on monthly and quarterly job figures. We added charts tracking total jobs for all Minnesota regions, greater Minnesota, and central cities and suburbs in the Twin Cities. And, we also added percent change in jobs since 2000 for these geographies to give us a sense of whether jobs are up or down over the last decade. For folks who like to keep track of month-to-month job changes, we kept a couple of our charts relying on monthly data: monthly percent change in jobs for Minnesota and the United States, and yearly net job change by industry.
Q: What prompted the changes?
A: Previously, our quarterly jobs charts were the only ones we had tracking total jobs over time, and they were a bit challenging to interpret because they bounced around season to season. Now, annual averages smooth out seasonal changes, while telling a story about total jobs. For example, we are often asked about how places in the state have fared during the recessions of the 2000s – this chart, showing total jobs for central cities and suburbs in the Twin Cities, helps us tell that story:
Paired with our new graph showing percent change in jobs since 2000, we can provide even greater context to that story. What we see more clearly in this graph is that St. Paul, in particular, shows no pattern of job recovery after the most recent recession (beginning at the end of 2007), unlike Minneapolis and the suburbs.
In fact, this is uncharacteristic of any other geography that we’re tracking in Minnesota – St. Paul stands alone in experiencing continued job loss since the start of the Great Recession.
Q: Are there other job highlights we should know about?
A: There are several, including:
- At 2 percent job growth since June 2012, Minnesota ranks 10th in the nation on this measure.
- When looking at greater Minnesota and the Twin Cities separately, we see greater Minnesota is only 9,300 jobs away from being back to its pre-recession job numbers. The Twin Cities is still 34,200 jobs away from this milestone.
- Only the West Central region of Minnesota has recovered the number of jobs lost during the Great Recession. All other regions in the state are working back to 2007 job levels.