Outlook on economy, job market looks promising

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - The future of the job market looks promising, and even the unemployed is seeing an improvement during the job hunt.

Close to 200 job seekers were at Frontier Tuesday night for a job fair .  Two people there said they've noticed more jobs being available recently.

"I think it's a lot better than it was," Lyndsay Riemen, who has been looking for work for six months, said.

"Everything gets better with time," Cameron Brooks, who has spent close to a year looking for steady work, said.

Both are right, at least, according to Indiana University-Purdue University Career Services Director, Jim McAtee.  McAtee said an estimated 1.3 million jobs will be added in 2012 nationwide.

He added that last year, 1.5 million jobs were created.  However, that is only a portion of the nine million jobs lost during the recession.

"It's probably going to take until 2014 or 2015 to get back to pre-recession levels, when we're talking about the number of jobs," McAtee said.

Jobs are coming back, but they aren't the same jobs that businesses had before the recession hit.

"A lot of jobs that are going to be in the market when we come out of the recession are going to be different than the pre-recession jobs," McAtee said.

The studies McAtee has seen says that when the recession ends, their will be an 18 percent increase in the amount of jobs that require an associate degree, compared to before the recession.  Jobs where a master's degree is required will be up 22 percent.  And jobs where applicants are required to have a doctorate degree will be up 20 percent.

With more jobs being created, McAtee said now is the time for job seekers to be out meeting employers.

"Hopefully they have been doing their networking," he said.  "That is so important these days.  If they haven't started it, they really need to."

With signs of the job market improving, job seekers who are confident in what they have to offer employers are no longer settling for just any job.

"I want to make sure I have something that can potentially lead to a career, "Riemen said.  "It's going to be full-time.  I'm not going to be away from my kids for eight hours a day for nothing."

"I got high standards," Brooks said.  "I'm not going to lower them."