Career Advice & News Center

According to a quarterly survey of 274 employers by the business analysts BNA, employment projections across the job market have stabilized in recent months, but remain well below levels achieved between 2006 and 2008, before the economic downturn.

The survey revealed that 11 percent of employers who reported plans to add production and services positions to their businesses in the first quarter of 2010. Though this figure represents a 10 percent slide from the final months of 2008, the good news is job prospects have stabilized after periods of wide-spread layoffs in the past year.

BNA's report revealed a small increase of employers with hiring expectations for production and service positions in the third quarter of 2009 (13 percent) and a small decrease in the year's final quarter (12 percent).

Roy Krause, CEO of Spherion, a company that reports each month on employment optimism, indicated that the steadiness of the service and production sector holds implications for the job market at large.

"We are encouraged by the growth in the services sector over the last few months," he commented. "It is widely known that an increase in this segment is historically a harbinger that broader hiring is on the horizon."

As Krause's statements imply, stabilized hiring expectations among other fields have begun to appear across several industries. After just 15 percent of executives planned to hire more technical workers between October and December 2009, the figure has risen to 17 percent for the first months of the new year, nearly matching 2009's yearlong high.

The same trend can be observed in the BNA's reported job outlook for clerical staffers, which jumped from three percentage points to 9 percent in since October.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate across all industries dropped to 10 percent in November.