California's Employment Development Department and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released California's November 2019 state jobs report earlier this month. Statewide nonfarm employment grew by an estimated 28,400 in November. The official unemployment rate remained at 3.9 percent, the modern series low. California employers have added at least 16,000 jobs in each of the last ten months, and at least 20,000 in nine of the ten.
The figure below summarizes nonfarm employment by sector based on the monthly survey of employers. Overall employment in the state has grown 1.9 percent over the previous 12 months, somewhat ahead of the national pace of 1.5 percent. The California sector that has most outpaced its national counterpart is information, which has grown over 3 percent in the state but has been nearly flat nationally. There appear to be two main reasons for this gap: first, 48 percent of California’s information sector jobs are in the fast-growing (and well-paying) software, data processing, and web search subsectors compared to 40 percent of national information sector jobs; second, these fast-growing subsectors have grown faster in California (10.3 percent over 12 months) than nationally (6.4 percent).
