Utah’s July job growth numbers increased 3.2 % over the past 12 months, adding 43,800 non-farm workers to payrolls. Carrie Mayne is the Chief Economist with the Utah Department of Workforce Services. She says it’s actually encouraging to see the number of unemployed workers decreased by only a tenth to 3.9 percent.
“So that tell us that the unemployment rate is moving as a response to workers who are seeing economic opportunity," Mayne says. "Those workers come in and they start looking for jobs. Yeah, that pushes the unemployment rate around, but we continue to add jobs so those opportunities abound.”
Mayne says the expectation is that there will be further shifts in jobs with the arrival of the school year.
“So we’ll see that employment change play out in the education arena; both in the public and the private sector. We’ll see the summer jobs start to wind down.”
Mayne says even though the construction industry is growing at the highest rate of any in the state, education added the largest number of jobs. She says combining the top three growth industries; Education, trade, transportation and utilities, and Construction, accounts for more than half of the total number of jobs created between July 2015 and last month.
