U.S. teens have become the first demographic group to fully recover their pre-coronavirus pandemic recession job levels as measured by percentage of the population employed.
That surprising result is visible in the following chart, we've tracked the non-seasonally adjusted employment-to-population ratio the various 5-year age group cohorts whose employment status is tracked through the Current Population Survey. The chart covers the period from January 2017 through May 2021, where February 2020 represents the last month before existing trends were broken by the negative employment impact of the coronavirus pandemic arriving in the United States.
In the next chart, we're showing three separate snapshots in time, for February 2020 (before), April 2020 (the bottom), and May 2021 (the latest data at this writing). The chart makes it very easy to see that the employed share of the teen population has surpassed its pre-coronavirus level, unlike every other age demographic group.
With respect to all other age groups, teens are the least educated, least skilled, and least experienced segment of the U.S. labor force. And yet, this demographic group has the first to recover to its pre-coronavirus recession level of employment. We'll explore the possible reasons for that in an upcoming post.
References
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. Employed persons and employment-population ratios by age. [Online Database]. Accessed 14 June 2021.