Labor Market Report for June 12th, 2020

Every week, we will be publishing labor market industry (LMI) data and important trends to consider in the development of an equitable economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. We are always looking for opportunities to learn, grow, and collaborate. Email [email protected] to learn more.

The employment crisis and recovery resulting from COVID-19 is unprecedented. At University City District, we have been monitoring the impact on the number of job postings across large industry sectors as a leading indicator of business optimism and employment prospects. We have found this analysis to be particularly valuable to our West Philadelphia Skills Initiative as we respond to a rapidly changing employment landscape. It is our hope that others in our community will also fund this useful.

In addition to monitoring overall trends, we will be looking closely at where jobs are coming back – and where they are not – in specific industries. We will also be exploring any variances between what is happening in the city of Philadelphia and the broader Metro Area. As we continue to face massive unemployment and disruption, we hope this research will help to shed light on the health of the labor market in our region.

We began our analysis by looking at unique job postings in high level industries throughout the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area for the week of February 9^th – February 15^th. This appears to be the last week where postings were within an expected range, prior to concerns about the spread of COVID-19. These numbers can be found in the 2^nd column below. Next, we looked at postings from the most recent week available, May 31^st to June 6^th. The final column shows the percentage change between February 9^th-15^th and May 31^st – June 6^th.

Every industry with a significant number of postings is still well below pre-COVID levels. As sobering as these numbers are, this is an improvement. During the week of May 10^th to May 16^th, job postings were 50% lower than they were in the benchmark week, with only 9,936 unique jobs posted across the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area.

About the data: Data is sourced from Burning Glass Technologies Labor Insights, unless otherwise noted.  Presented below is the result of tracking week over week job postings in the city of Philadelphia and in the Philadelphia Metro Statistical Area (MSA), which is comprised of roughly a circle surrounding Trenton, Philadelphia, King of Prussia, Camden, and Wilmington. This data is then compared to a benchmark week of February 9^th – 15^th, which was the last week before the economic impact of COVID-19 began to be reflected in job posting data.