NC Employment by Industry: broad-based improvement in April

After updating the charts to include April NC employment data last week, I decided to also consider employment by industry in NC. That is, since job losses are slowing, where is the improvement? Was the job loss of the past year concentrated in a few industries, or was it more broad?

First, consider which industries are the biggest employers in NC (as of Dec. 2007, the beginning of the downturn):


Now, let's look at the percent decrease in employment in each of these industries since April 2008 ("Other" omitted):


Wow - declines of greater than 5% in Professional & Business Services, TTU, and Manufacturing, and a shocking 23.4% decline in Construction, including a 10% drop from November to December. "Education and Health Services" and "Government" are the only sectors that are growing. It also seems that the recent moderating of job loss was consistent across industries.

Although this drop in Construction employment is incredible, remember that Construction was only 6% of total employment in Dec. 2007. So how much did these declines in each industry contribute to total job loss?

I created the following graph as a way to visualize jobs lost in each industry by month. The y-axis is jobs lost per month - if the industry gained jobs, the data point is omitted:


Some points that stand out to me:
1. With the depth of the banking crisis, I expected the Financial Activities industry to have experienced significant job losses, hurting employment in the state, but this is decidedly not the case.
2. The number of jobs lost in each industry has declined significantly from March to April - that is, every industry but Manufacturing, which lost 4,600 more jobs in April.
3. Between 63% and 88% of jobs lost each month from November - March were in four industries: Construction, Professional & Business Services, TTU, and Manufacturing.

Note: "Other" includes "Other Services", "Information", and "Natural Resources and Mining".