The Conference Board’s US employment trends index ticked up in April to a reading of 128.22 from March’s downwardly revised reading of 127.15. The April reading is up 5.8% from the same month a year ago.

“April’s bounceback in the employment trends index is somewhat reassuring, but expectations remain that job growth will be slower this year compared with last year,” said Gad Levanon, managing director of macroeconomic and labor market research at The Conference Board. “Given that the labor force is barely expanding, job growth of about 200,000 per month will be sufficient to continue rapidly lowering the unemployment rate.”

Positive contributions from seven of the eight index components drove April’s increase. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, real manufacturing and trade sales, number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, initial claims for unemployment insurance, job openings, and industrial production.