IS EMPLOYMENT FINALLY ON THE UPSWING?

Throughout the Northeast Ohio region, residents have a negative opinion of job opportunities in their county, although the levels varied significantly by county. Stark County had the highest negative rating with 62% rating the availability of job opportunities as poor or very poor. The negative rating is also alarmingly high in Cuyahoga and Summit Counties with more than half of respondents in each county rating the availability of job opportunities negatively.  Medina County had the lowest negative rating with just 26% rating job opportunities negatively. 

When looking at how the rating of the availability of job opportunities has changed over the past five years, some clear trends emerge. All three counties had a drop in favorable rating between 2009 and 2010, with 2010 being the lowest rating in the past five years in all counties. Since 2010, the ratings in all three counties has slowly started to rise again, albeit at a much slower rate than the rate at which they dropped in preceding years.

Note: Cuyahoga is not included in this chart due to only having 1 year of data. Most recent Medina County data is from January 2012 (not 2011).

County unemployment rates show similar trends as the data from the collaborative polls.  Medina County has the lowest unemployment rate for all of the past five years while Stark County as had the highest. In all four counties, the unemployment rate rose steadily between 2007 and 2009, remained mostly stagnant between 2009 and 2010, and started to decrease between 2010 and 2011.

¹Source: Ohio Labor Market  

The Collaborative Poll program is a research service offered by CMOR to organizations, agencies and businesses with a county-wide interest as an affordable method of collecting information on opinions & attitudes of county residents. A Collaborative Poll is an annual telephone survey that includes questions posed by multiple organizations in which each participant pays for only those questions necessary to meet their information and research needs.

 

The Center for Marketing & Opinion Research (CMOR) is a full service public opinion research firm located in the Portage Lakes area providing innovative research solutions to non-profits, government agencies, social service organizations, colleges and universities, and hospitals. CMOR utilizes multiple modes of data collection including telephone, web and mail surveys and focus group administration as well as offering comprehensive consulting services including consultation on research and survey design, program evaluation, grant writing, data management, analysis and report writing.