2011 Employment and Salary Outlook

By Dona DeZube, Monster Finance Careers Expert

Signs the job market is improving are everywhere, but without a big jolt of shockingly good economic news, it may be hard to believe employment could pick up in 2011.

Positive hiring trends at year-end 2010 included:

• 10 consecutive months of private-sector employment gains.
• The most optimistic corporate hiring trends in more than two years.
• An expected 3 percent increase in college hiring over 2010.

Despite those positive hiring trends, economists are still painting a dim picture of the 2011 job market because US companies aren’t creating enough jobs to employ everyone in America who’s unemployed.

What’s more, any brightening in the employment outlook will draw back into the job market millions of discouraged workers who stopped looking for work during the recession.

“We have 500,000 people that have dropped out of the workforce in California alone,” says Jeffrey Michael, PhD, director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. “As the job market improves, they’re going to be coming back in, so it’s going to continue to be difficult to find work.”
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