by Calculated Risk on 8/05/2011 01:15:00 PM

Here are the earlier employment posts (with graphs):
• July Employment Report: 117,000 Jobs, 9.1% Unemployment Rate
• Employment Summary, Part Time Workers, and Unemployed over 26 Weeks
• Employment graph gallery

And a few more graphs based on the employment report ...

Duration of Unemployment
This graph shows the duration of unemployment as a percent of the civilian labor force. The graph shows the number of unemployed in four categories: less than 5 week, 6 to 14 weeks, 15 to 26 weeks, and 27 weeks or more.

Two key categories moved down in a little in July. The 27 weeks and more (the long term unemployed) declined slightly to 6.2 million workers, or 4.0% of the labor force.

Also the less than 5 weeks category declined in July after increasing in June.

Unemployment by Education
This graph shows the unemployment rate by four levels of education (all groups are 25 years and older).

Unfortunately this data only goes back to 1992 and only includes one previous recession (the stock / tech bust in 2001). Clearly education matters with regards to the unemployment rate - and it appears all four groups are generally trending down.

Although education matters for the unemployment rate, it doesn't appear to matter as far as finding new employment (all four categories are only gradually declining).

Note: This says nothing about the quality of job - many college graduates are underemployed.

Diffusion Indexes
This is a little more technical. The BLS diffusion index for total private employment was at 58.6 in July, up from 56.6 in June, and for manufacturing, the diffusion index increased slightly to 53.1.

Think of this as a measure of how widespread job gains are across industries. The further from 50 (above or below), the more widespread the job losses or gains reported by the BLS. From the BLS:

Figures are the percent of industries with employment increasing plus one-half of the industries with unchanged employment, where 50 percent indicates an equal balance between industries with increasing and decreasing employment.