When the COVID shutdowns landed, Nebraska was hit hard like everywhere else. Within a month, non-farm jobs were down 99k, a drop of over 9%. It wasn’t as bad as the national 14% loss, but still bad. Despite all this, Nebraska recently passed a huge milestone that is great news for the state!
Here are Five Fast Facts about Nebraska’s post-pandemic job performance:
- 💨 Quick Response - The state took advantage of the money flowing from Washington DC to help keep small businesses alive, and Gov. Ricketts chose targeted approaches and voluntary responsibility rather than forced blanket shutdowns. This helped recover ⅔ of the lost jobs within a year. Boo-yah!
- 🐢 Dragging It Out - There are several factors that stretched out the remainder of the recovery, including baby boomers deciding retirement was the way to go and younger workers unable to find (or afford) child care.
- 📈📉 All Over The Map - The recovery has been uneven. Some sectors, like hospitality and education, are still seeing shortages. But others, like health care, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture, are strong. Building stuff and making things is apparently good business.
- 👪 More Of Us - One other key to the recovery is overall population growth. All of the states that have seen the biggest jobs increases since the pandemic are also the fastest-growing states by population. Other states wish they could be as cool as us.
- 🎉 Bottom Line - Nebraska’s economy has been one of the most resilient in the nation, and as of this month has passed the overall employment numbers from before the pandemic! Yay us!
🔥Bottom line: There are still jobs out there to be had, if anyone is looking. The unemployment rate is currently 2.4%, one of the lowest in the nation, but there are still about 50k open job listings across the state. So, let’s keep pushing ahead, creating more jobs and earning more good Paychecks!
What’s been your experience with working during the last 2.5 years?
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