Not All Sectors Have Suffered Equally

Each month, Monster Worldwide publishes its Monster Employment Index (MEI), a

gauge of U.S. online job demand based on a real-time review of millions of employer job opportunities culled from a large representative selection of corporate career Web sites and job boards, including Monster.com.

Although many analysts drew comfort from the fact that the long-term growth rate turned positive last month (with the index up 2 percent year-on-year), for the first time since the December 2009 the MEI remains 27 percent below where it was at the start of the downturn and 34 percent below its May 2007 peak.

Still, if you drill down and look at how the various industry sub-indexes have performed since the recession began, it's clear that not all sectors have suffered equally.

Not surprisingly, finance & insurance and real estate renting & leasing have been among the biggest losers in comparative terms. By the same token, public administration -- that is, working for the government -- has been a relative winner, which is not all that unexpected, while the mining sector has no doubt benefitted from activity in global commodity markets.

A big surprise to me, at least, has been the relative strength in construction-related job postings, which seems totally at odds with what has occurred in the residential and commercial real estate markets. (Is this because builders and developers tend to be hopeless optimists?)

Otherwise, the fact that agriculture & forestry-related hiring demand is signficantly higher than it was at the beginning of the recession also seems rather interesting.

One key question, of course, is whether the current pattern is set to continue in future, whether or not economic conditions improve as many mainstream analysts expect, and if the wide divergence between the best and worst sectors will remain as it is now.

Any thoughts?