Gap between available jobs and job seekers narrows to 6 million from 18 million in the early days of the pandemic.

By Manuel Gutierrez, Consulting Economist to NKBA

There was a modest improvement in the number of September job openings, which rose to a total of 6.4 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  These numbers have bounced back from between 5 million and 6 million available jobs since the worst of the pandemic, and have been hovering within the 6 million  to 6.6 million range.

The current number of openings still lags the monthly average of 7.2 million maintained throughout 2019, as seen by the dashed line in the chart below.

The slow pace of growth in the number of openings may suggest that the broad economic recovery has stalled. Further improvement depends on whether  government assistance programs, such as the CARES Act, receive an extension beyond the end of the year.

The most openings were available in Professional and Business Services, accounting for one in five available jobs. This category includes a number of industries that provide support to businesses as well as to households. They include accounting, legal, engineering and consulting services, among others, and for the most part require a high degree of specialized expertise and training.

Other industries with a large number of openings are Trade & Transportation and Health and Social Services, each with 17% of the current available positions. These industries also require specialized training and expertise. Job requirements In the Health Care/Social Services arena vary widely, including anything from highly specialized medical personnel to staff who oversee care and maintenance of people or facilities.

Although data on job openings has been available since 2000, 2018 marked the first time the number of available jobs exceeded the number of people seeking a job.

From around 2018 until the time of the pandemic, there were an average of a million more jobs available than there were unemployed people. Businesses were expanding their employee payrolls, and more people were joining the work force because of the additional work opportunities.

At the height of the pandemic in April, that trend came to an abrupt halt. The number of unemployed people skyrocketed to more than 23 million, up from 5.8 million just two months earlier. During that time frame, the number of job openings fell to 5 million, a drop of 2 million in two months. Since then, the gap between the number of unemployed and job openings has shrunk substantially, from 18 million to the current 6 million.