Australia’s employment levels are at their highest in 37 years, calming concerns over the health of the Australian economy, reports The Australian Times. A report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) revealed that 121,000 jobs were created in August 2014– the biggest rise in employment since records began in 1978.

The unemployment rate has also taken a positive turn, sitting at 6.1% for August compared with 6.4% in July. While analysts cautioned that the monthly reports were, “notoriously volatile and carried a lot of statistical noise”, the upward trend could not be ignored.

Stephen Walters, Chief Economist at JPMorgan, told Reuters: “It’s really an off-the scale result to get more than 100,000 jobs created against expectations of only about 10,000 to 15,000, and is clearly a very big upside surprise.”

“It’s always a bit difficult to track what’s really going on in the labour market just looking at employment on its own, but when you look at the unemployment rate it’s actually come all the way back down to 6.1%, which is where we were a few months ago,” he added.

Employment indicators also showed an increase in jobs advertised, with an ANZ survey revealing that job advertisements were rising for a third straight month in August to be up almost +8% on the year.

Spiros Papadopoulos, Senior Economist at the National Australia Bank, commented: “First impressions are that it’s obviously providing a bit of catch up in employment after some very weak jobs growth in recent months.”

The statistics did show a more than usual rise in part-time employment but added that, because of the unusually strong increase in employment estimates, it had extensively checked the data.

More conservative analysts said that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was familiar with the volatility of this data and recommended that a conclusion on the welfare of the jobs market could only be made after a consistent run of better jobs numbers.