When the wind is at your back…

            A month ago, my article on the unprecedented strength of our job market suggested all the ongoing factors that could have derailed our high-powered job creation engine: a new Covid variant, supply chain issues, inflation, truckers’ strike, shaky couple of months for the stock market.

            Factors that could have caused trouble – but didn’t.

            To keep an open mind and to allow for unexpected pitfalls, though, I said that even though it’s too early to tell what the awful situation in Ukraine will do to our job market, let’s check back in a month; I think our conversation will not change.

            Well, it’s a month later and no, that conversation has not changed one iota. The Ukraine story had grown worse than we ever thought it would be (although there are now glimmers of hope for these incredibly resilient people). With it all, the job market news continued to get better and better. Coming off 2021, with 6.743 million jobs created, and the first two months of 2022 with another 1.166 million jobs, Wham! – March comes in at 431,000 plus an upward revision of January and February of a combined 88,000. Net increase from March’s numbers: 431 + 88 = 519K. Monthly average in Q1 2022 = 562K. Monthly average for all of 2021 = 562K. How ‘bout that!

            What’s more impressive, when you crunch the numbers, is that even the corrosive inflation and rampant gasoline prices we’re enduring haven’t stunted the job market’s performance. For sure, it’s painful at the pump and unsettling at the supermarket, but 93 percent of the jobs lost in March/April 2020 have been recovered – in just 23 months. While the aftershocks of that disaster were still being felt, prognosticators were targeting as far out as 2030 before we’d recover all those jobs. At our current sustained rate, we’ll probably get there in July. Not July 2030. July 2022.

            Not done yet. There are now 1.8 open jobs for every unemployed worker, causing problems not for job seekers but for employers, who have no choice but to pay more for the talent they hire. What’s the upshot? With explosive job growth plus rapidly rising wages (5.6 percent in the last 12 months, compared to 2-3 percent in the 2010s), many households now have it in their power to bring in more income than previously possible. That exposes the politicization of the inflation issue for exactly what it is: temporary, disproportionate, and inappropriate. Inflation is indeed a legitimate problem; it is not a political football.

            Every corner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report is filled with proof and validation of the health of this job market, but lest we think that’s the purpose of this essay, and lest we misinterpret the message, here it is.

            This is no time to relax, no time to take anything for granted, no time to let up. Any runner knows that when the wind is at your back, you run harder than ever. That, by the way, is why any records set in sprints or hurdles with more than a 2-meter per second (4.5 miles per hour) tailwind are not certified as records. But this is not a track meet; it’s a job market that just happens to have a powerful wind at your back.

            This is when you intensify your efforts, broaden your network, embellish your credentials, sharpen your five tools (résumé and profile, interviewing strategies, job search strategies, career planning, and networking), circle back to old connections (including former employers), engage a professional career coach, elevate your job targets, readjust your salary expectations upwards, hone your negotiating skills, and run like there is no finish line.

            The good news, I sincerely think, is that this job market will sustain its momentum for the foreseeable future, as it has proven – time and again over the last two years – that it has been capable of weathering every conceivable storm. I am making neither projections nor predictions. Statisticians make the former; fools make the latter. I am, however, expressing quite confidently my expectations that, for those who choose to act decisively and without delay, opportunities will continue to abound.

            If you agree, you’ll also agree with one of my most firmly held maxims: One step taken in advance is longer than 10 steps taken to catch up.

            Or you can go with what Sun Tzu said: “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”

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Career Coach Eli Amdur provides one-on-one coaching in job search, résumés, and interviewing.

Reach him at [email protected] or 201-357-5844.