June 2008 Job Count for the Virginia Beach Area Rose Over the Year (PDF)

Total nonfarm employment for the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News Metropolitan Statistical Area stood at 799,800 in June 2008, up 10,400 jobs over the year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today.  Nonfarm employment in the Virginia Beach area grew by 1.3 percent from June 2007 to June 2008, compared to a 0.1-percent decline in employment for the nation as a whole.  Sheila Watkins, the Bureau’s regional commissioner, noted that the over-the-year employment advances in the Virginia Beach metropolitan area extended back to October 2006—the 21st consecutive increase in local payrolls.  (See chart A and table 1; Technical Note at end of release contains metropolitan area definition. All data in this release are not seasonally adjusted; accordingly, over-the-year analysis is used throughout.)

Chart A.  Total nonfarm employment, over-the-year percent change in the United States and the Virginia Beach metropolitan area, June 1998-June 2008

In the Virginia Beach metropolitan area, the other services supersector (which includes equipment and machinery repairing, promoting or administering religious activities, grantmaking, advocacy, and such services as providing dry-cleaning and laundry, personal care, death care, pet care, photofinishing, temporary parking, and dating) experienced the largest employment gain, adding 2,700 jobs over the year.  Locally, other services employment increased at a 7.3 percent pace, well above the national rate of 0.4 percent.  (See table 1 and chart B.) 

Chart B.  Over-the-year percent change in employment by selected industry supersector, United States and the Virginia Beach metropolitan area, June 2008

Since June 2007, the education and health services and professional and business services supersectors in the Virginia Beach area added 2,500 and 2,400 jobs, respectively.  The recent advance in professional and business services payrolls represented a 2.3-percent over-the-year change; nationwide, this supersector declined at a 0.2-percent pace.  The local growth rate of 2.8 percent in education and health services was comparable to the 3.0-percent increase recorded for the nation as a whole over this same time period.

Three other industries in the Virginia Beach area had job increases of at least 1,000 from June 2007 to June 2008:  natural resources, mining, and construction; leisure and hospitality; and government. 

Job losses of a 1,000 or more in the Virginia Beach area were limited to only the manufacturing supersector, which lost 1,900 from June 2007 to June 2008.  The manufacturing industry has not posted an over-the-year increase in local employment since August 2005.  The recent 12-month decline in local manufacturing employment represented a 3.3-percent decrease; at the national level, employment in this industry fell by 2.6 percent.

Technical Note

This release presents nonfarm payroll employment estimates from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program.  The CES survey is a Federal-State cooperative endeavor in which State employment security agencies prepare the data using concepts, definitions, and technical procedures prescribed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Employment

Definitions.  Employment data refer to persons on establishment payrolls who receive pay for any part of the pay period that includes the 12th of the month.  Persons are counted at their place of work rather than at their place of residence; those appearing on more than one payroll are counted on each payroll.  Industries are classified on the basis of their principal activity in accordance with the 2007 version of the North American Industry Classification System.

Method of estimation.  The employment data are estimated using a "link relative" technique in which a ratio (link relative) of current-month employment to that of the previous month is computed from a sample of establishments reporting for both months.  The estimates of employment for the current month are obtained by multiplying the estimates for the previous month by these ratios.  Small-domain models are used as the official estimators for the approximately 39 percent of CES published series which have insufficient sample for direct sample-based estimates.

Annual revisions.  Employment estimates are adjusted annually to a complete count of jobs, called benchmarks, derived principally from tax reports that are submitted by employers who are covered under state unemployment insurance (UI) laws.  The benchmark information is used to adjust the monthly estimates between the new benchmark and the preceding one and also to establish the level of employment for the new benchmark month.  Thus, the benchmarking process establishes the level of employment, and the sample is used to measure the month-to-month changes in the level for the subsequent months.

Reliability of the estimates

The estimates presented in this release are based on sample survey, administrative data, and modeling and, thus, are subject to sampling and other types of errors.  Sampling error is a measure of sampling variability—that is, variation that occurs by chance because a sample rather than the entire population is surveyed.  Survey data also are subject to nonsampling errors, such as those which can be introduced into the data collection and processing operations.  Estimates not directly derived from sample surveys are subject to additional errors resulting from the specific estimation processes used. The sums of individual items may not always equal the totals shown in the same tables because of rounding.

Employment estimates.  Measures of sampling error are available for state CES data at the total nonfarm and supersector level and for metropolitan area CES data.  Information on recent benchmark revisions for states is available on the BLS Web site at www.bls.gov/sae/.

Area definitions.  The substate area data published in this release reflect the standards and definitions established by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget on November 20, 2007.  A detailed list of the geographic definitions is available at www.whitehouse.gov/omb/bulletins/fy2008/b08-01.pdf.

The Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, Va.-N.C. Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) includes Gloucester, Isle of Wight, James City, Mathews, Surry, and York Counties and Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Poquoson, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, and Williamsburg cities in Virginia and Currituck County in North Carolina.

Additional information

More complete information on the technical procedures used to develop these estimates and additional data appear in Employment and Earnings, which is available by subscription from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402 (telephone 202-512-1800). 

Industry employment data for states and metropolitan areas from the CES program are also available in the above mentioned news releases and from the Internet at (www.bls.gov/sae/). 

For personal assistance or further information on the Current Employment Statistics program, as well as other Bureau programs, contact the Mid-Atlantic Information Office at 215-597-3282 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET.