How has the job market changed since COVID?

Changes under the surface

In June 2022, the number of U.S. employees hit a new all-time high, surpassing the previous record set in February 2020, just prior to the COVID crash.

The top-line aggregate number, however, doesn’t tell us the whole story of how things have changed since then. To dig deeper, we can consider various segments of the labor market that have either grown or shrank:

Professional and business services and information makes a lot of sense - COVID pushed a lot of things online and the knowledge workforce grew to support that. Trade and transportation is a bit of a surprise, given the supply chain issues we’ve had. And, despite all the talk about people leaving education and healthcare due to burnout, that area of the labor market has been somewhat static.

The leisure and hospitality drop isn’t a surprise - travel got crushed when the pandemic hit. Mining and logging is a bit of a surprise though until one realizes that a lot of oil and gas work is categorized in there. Oil got destroyed to the point of going negative and, even with the strong comeback, those jobs take a while to ramp back up.

Overall, the world is a very different place than it was two and a half years ago and the labor market is just one of the things that reflects that. The big takeaway for me though? That all of that COVID shock happened two and half years ago…wow. Time flies.