In county by county July employment data, Orange County ranked as the most job producing county in the state for both the month of July and the year to date. See our related article below. The state level employment for August has not been released yet, but when it is, we will update our exclusive OC180NEWS analysis. Meanwhile, another job data report is out, and it indicates San Francisco Bay Area is the California metropolitan area with the most job openings.

This non-governmental survey, dubbed the CareerCast.com/JobSerf Employment Index, has tracked since July of last year job postings in 30 major metropolitan areas across the country. Four California areas - Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Riverside - are included in the survey. The scores represent the per capita online managerial job postings for each area.

Of the four California major metropolitan areas, San Francisco has long ranked in first place. In July, San Francisco dipped to an index value of 105, down from the June high of 112. But, the
Bay Area bounced back to 109 for August. Not a record, but a strong move in the right direction. This means, that excluding the dip last month, San Francisco has improved in online job postings every month since November, 2009.

This score for San Francisco ranks it number 3 nationally, compared to Washington DC and Boston. Washington has an index score of 177 and Boston came in at 136. Both of these cities had moderate gains in August. These index values are per capita and thus can be compared between cities. For example, a city with an index value of 50 has half the jobs, after taking into account population, as a city with a score of 100.

Just as San Francisco is the highest ranked city in California, Riverside has been at the other end of the scale since the index was started back in July 2009. In fact, the relative ranking of these four benchmark California areas has not changed since the beginning of the index. In between Riverside at the bottom and San Francisco at the top, San Diego is second place and Los Angeles comes in third.

While the ranking of the four cities has not changed in over a year, the growth among them is very different. All four cities have improved their number of online job postings since July 2009. But the three lower ranking areas have grown by similar percentages, while top ranked San Francisco has grown considerably faster.

A year ago, San Francisco’s job posting index was 51. The current value of 109 represents an increase of 214%. The rates of growth among the other three California cities are between 150% for San Diego and 162% for Los Angeles. Bottom ranked Riverside, where the index value went up from 11 in July 2009 to the current value of 17, grew by 155%.

So not only are there at least 6 times as many jobs per capita in San Francisco than there are in Riverside, the job market is growing faster up north. With an August index of 57, second ranked San Diego has about half as many job postings as San Francisco on a per capita basis, but they are much better off than Riverside.

With a 3 point gain in August, Los Angeles continued its improving trend which has been unbroken since January 2010. Now at 47, LA is within 10 points of San Diego, which was flat in August.

Click here to read the full report or for more information.
http://www.careercast.com/jobs

Stay tuned to OC180NEWS for our continuing exclusive jobs and employment analysis. The data we use for our OC180NEWS county by county employment analysis should be available from the state for August in about two weeks.