Wall Street has recovered; have you?

While it's dropped back down a bit from this level, at the end of October, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at the level where it was before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy touched off the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008. News reports hint at the return of lavish bonuses for executives and traders at top Wall Street firms. In other words, for brokers, the recession's over and it's party time again.

Or is it? The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the financial services sector continues to shed jobs, though at a lesser rate than before. From a net loss of 19,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis in October 2009, the financial activities sector has recovered to the point where it shed only 1,000 jobs last month.

Of course, the financial services sector includes much more than Wall Street traders. It includes your neighborhood bank or credit union, the insurance agent down the street, and your neighbor the financial planner, among others. And just as the crash hit Wall Street first and hardest, taking the rest of the economy with it, so it appears that the recovery has fully taken hold first on Wall Street.

Then again, that's where all those banks and insurers deemed "too big to fail" were -- if they weren't in Washington, that is. Financial activity is still sluggish on Main Street: Even banks with money to lend seem to have a hard time finding qualified borrowers, and savers will probably get a better return on their savings from their mattresses. Neither of these make for glad tidings in the off-Wall Street part of the financial services industry, and as long as this is the case, employment growth in financial services is likely to remain relatively anemic at best.

What are you seeing as you seek opportunities in the financial services sector? Share your comments with me and your fellow job-seekers.

Even a down market offers many job opportunities. Find yours at FinancialJobBank.com.