The Conference Board Employment Trends Index increased in December. The index now stands at 115.76, up from 115.72 (an upward revision) in November. The ETI figure for December is 5.2 percent higher than a year ago.

"Despite the disappointing job numbers for December, the improvement in the Employment Trends Index is signaling solid employment growth in the months ahead," said Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "With the labor force barely growing, partly due to the massive wave of baby boomers retiring, this job growth will continue to rapidly bring down the unemployment rate."

December's increase in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of its eight components. From the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Number of Temporary Employees, Consumer Confidence Survey Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get," Job Openings, Industrial Production, Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales, and Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now.

The Employment Trends Index aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.

The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index include:

• Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get" (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey)

• Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor)

• Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation)

• Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

• Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers (BLS)

• Job Openings (BLS)**

• Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board)*

• Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)**

The Conference Board publishes the Employment Trends Index monthly, at 10 a.m. ET on the Monday that follows each Friday release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report. The technical notes to this series are available on The Conference Board website: http://www.conference-board.org/data/eti.cfm.

  *Statistical imputation for the recent month

**Statistical imputation for two most recent months