Job Market “Exceeds” Expectations Again. WHY?

Here are three points of interest about April’s jobs report, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier today:

1. Another 253,000 jobs were created, making April the 28^th straight month continuing this powerful trend.

2. The unemployment rate fell again – to 3.4% – the lowest since 1969, and bettered only by the population, housing, and manufacturing booms of the early 1950s.

3. Once again, the headlines were all agog, replete with wording like “exceeding expectations,” “shocking,” and “unexpected.”

Here are my three comments:

1. Yup.

2. Yup.

3. Why, for God’s sake? After 28 straight months of this performance, why are analysts and reporters either surprised or maintaining misplaced low expectations?

A rising tide

Twelve days ago, I published a post here that suggested that there could be a bit of a slowdown, but in the end, we’d have another good month. Indeed, another good month it was – and then some. To wit: (1) A quarter of a million new jobs were created, (2) Unemployment dipped to 3.4%, (3) job creation was again evenly distributed across the board, with professional and business services leading the way with 43K, followed by health care (40K), leisure and hospitality (31K), social assistance (25K), financial activities (23K), government (23K), and mining/oil extraction (6K). All other sectors were little changed. The rising tide is still lifting all ships.

For accuracy’s sake, job gains in February and March were revised downward by a total of 149,000, leaving a net gain in the first four months of the year of 1.138 million, or a monthly average of 285,000.

While that’s all going on, wages continue to rise. Average hourly earnings were up another 0.5% for the month, 4.4% year over year.

I ask again…

Why is this continuing to exceed expectations? Why do expectations stay low? This job market of ours has become normal, SOP, an overall ongoing statement of wellness. Our job market is in excellent health, all components functioning as they should. Some prognosticators and pundits just refuse to issue high expectations, for fear of … who knows what?

It’s all about attitude.

I’m an independent career coach and have been coaching people from the boardroom to the mailroom, and from their teens to their eighties – a total of more than 7,000 in my 26 years at this. And I can tell you – without exception – that before anything else, your attitude determines your altitude (corny as that expression is), whether you’re a candidate searching for a job or an employer building a workforce. Either way, you’re going to make consequential decisions based on the way you see things, and from my vantage point, there are only two ways: optimistically or pessimistically. Now, occasionally I get stopped when I discuss this either at a networking group or while giving a presentation, by someone who says there’s a third way: realistically. Well, I was brought up not to laugh at someone with others present, so my response is usually more staid: Who says an optimist can’t be a realist? If things are genuinely good, so be it. Actually, that’s exactly what I’d like to hear from my doctor after surgery or from my broker on any given day or from my mechanic after my car was making funny noises.

Ike had it right.

General Dwight David Eisenhower, who arguably faced the most overwhelming odds (D-Day and the end of World War II) of any other victorious military leader in history, used to say, “Pessimism never won any battle.”

That’s what I don’t understand about low expectations in times like this. The job market is great, has been for 28 straight months, and shows every indication that it will continue: month after month and crisis after crisis, into the foreseeable future.