Even if you haven’t paid much attention to the news in the past year, all the talk is about job outlook. It is difficult to predict how many jobs will be created or lost each year anywhere in the nation, and the same can be said for Chicago.

The most recent Chicago Fed Midwest Manufacturing Index was released at the end of December and it shows some promise and some concern at the same time for the month of October. The report provides a glimmer of hope for manufacturing workers in the Chicago area for 2014.

Points of Note from the Report

There are some major points to take away from the latest report. There are four of them, two that show increases in production and two that show decreases in production. The two areas that showed production growth were the regional steel sector and the regional resource sector. The steel industry experienced a 2.2 percent growth in production in October while the resource sector saw only a 0.3 percent increase in production in October.

In the automotive sector, the production output dropped by 0.2 percent for the month of October. In the machinery sector, production dropped by 0.4 percent in October.

What is promising from the report for the steel sector is that it posted a 2.2 percent increase in production after experiencing a 0.4 percent dip in September. It also was a 5.9 percent increase for the region from October of 2012. The regional resource sector output also saw an increase after dropping by 1.3 percent in September. The sector also experienced a 1.7 percent increase from the same time in 2012.

The automotive and machinery sectors experienced drops in production after posting gains in the month of September.

What Does This Mean for Chicago?

So, after presenting all of this data, what does it mean for the Chicago region? It is tough to predict how jobs will increase or decrease, but some analysts expect a healthy jobs gain for the country in 2014. Others, however, expect anywhere from 195,000 to 200,000 jobs being added to payrolls each month in 2014. This would keep the unemployment rate hovering around 7 percent, which is where it stands right now.

The outlook for Chicago is not strong for 2014. In fact, most analysts expect growth to be strongest in the West and South regions of the country. This excludes Chicago, which did not appear in most reports. In fact, the recent Joint Economic Committee report says that 15 states and the District of Columbia recovered all of the jobs lost during the recession. Illinois is not named on the list. Since Chicago has not been named on lists of state expected to lose massive amounts of jobs, or gain them, it could be status quo for the city in 2014.

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