Some good news this week about the Silicon Valley economy. A new report says that jobs are returning to Silicon Valley.
Employers in Santa Clara and San Benito counties added 15,800 jobs across a variety of sectors during the past 12 months, boosting the valley’s payroll employment by 1.8 percent between December 2005 and December 2006, according to a report released Friday by the state Economic Development Department.
The valley hasn’t experienced year-over-year job growth of this magnitude since April 2001, when the region gained 21,200 jobs — a 2.05 percent increase — over the previous 12 months, experts said. After that, local employment plummeted with year-over-year job losses each month until October 2004.
[...] that Silicon Valley added 33,000 new jobs in 2006, for a 3% increase. That’s even better than estimates from a few weeks ago. There was particular growth in creative and software industries, but declines [...]