When you try to assess the state of the economy, then you can quickly find yourself confused and not sure what you’re supposed to think. On one hand, you have the unemployment rate, which seems to have only taken a few baby steps downward but it is significantly better that it was a couple of years ago. Then you have the right amount of new jobs added to the economy each month, which has been on a steady rise for the last year or so. Yet, while we can point out that there are many reasons to be optimistic about the current state of job growth, what matters is whether or not job seekers are successful in their searches.

Fortunately, a recent CareerBuilder survey suggests that the searches for jobs are improving, particularly for the workers who had recently been laid off. Of the surveyed workers who were laid off from full-time positions, a 4 percent improvement over the last year. Fortunately, almost 90 percent of the workers have found themselves new full-time jobs, and 10 percent found new part-time jobs.

Opportunities in Unexpected Places:

As we say with the mass layoffs during the Great Recession, all of the industries do not weather the economy is the same exact way. The financial industry went through a very hard rough patch than the heath care and the education did. As a result from the survey, the workers realized that their best chances for finding employment may not be in the same industry as they had previously been working in.

Also according to the survey, almost 60 percent of the laid-off workers who found new jobs found them off in a different industry. Back in 2010, only 48 percent of the workers said the same, which is a sign that the workers are broadening their job searches and repackaging themselves for new employers.

”Over the last few years, we’ve seen workers, out of necessity, cast a wider net and discover new career paths they may never have considered pre-recession,” said Brent Rasmussen, who is the president of CareerBuilder. ”New talent is flowing in and out of industries as workers apply their skill sets to new occupations.” For some of the new workers, this means that they are taking their existing skills and looking someplace else. For an example, someone with a little bit of legal experience may have been laid off from the law firm, but now they can look to major corporations or even the government, as every organization needs a bit of legal counsel.

For all of the other workers, their job search is going to need a different kind of reinvention. Something different to give it more of an edge.