The Triad's job market began 2011 on a gloomy note in January.
The unemployment rate jumped to 10.7 percent from 10 percent in December, the N.C. Employment Security Commission reported Friday.
The rate for the Winston-Salem metropolitan statistical area rose nearly a full percentage point to 10.1 percent. The MSA consists of Davie, Forsyth, Stokes and Yadkin counties.
Forsyth County's rate rose to 9.8 percent from 9.1 percent. Watauga County — up 0.8 percentage points to 8.6 percent — was the only other county in the Triad and Northwest North Carolina to have its rate below double digits.
Economists and employment officials pointed to several factors for the rate hike.
•The annual federally mandated benchmarking of the 2010 employment data.
Each year, the commission has to recalculate how it measures employment data, which can lead to an upward or downward revision of the monthly jobless rates for the previous year. It also accounts for the delay in the local and state January unemployment reports.
The annual revision showed that the jobs gap "is even bigger than first thought," said John Quinterno, a principal with South by North Strategies, a Chapel Hill research firm specializing in economic and social policy.
"The benchmarking just gives us a more accurate sense of the situation the state is facing."
•All eight of the major private-sector employment sectors in the Triad, along with government, reported a drop in jobs during January.
There were at least a combined 2,800 fewer trade, transportation and utilities jobs in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro-High Point metropolitan statistical areas, along with 2,600 fewer financial and business services jobs and 1,400 fewer government jobs.
Larry Parker, a spokesman for the commission, said a change in seasonal employment in retail stores accounted for part of the jobless rate hike. He also labeled as seasonal the decline in employment at state colleges and universities from December to January.
•There were nearly 6,100 fewer people listed as employed in the Triad and 5,427 more considered as unemployed.
The traditional jobless rate does not include several categories of people, such as those who have stopped looking for work, are underemployed for their skills, are able to work full time but can only get part-time work, are receiving severance packages after the elimination of their jobs, or have exhausted their state and federal unemployment benefits.
A rate compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — the U6 index — includes those people. The latest update for North Carolina found that 17.4 percent of adults were without jobs as of Dec. 31, compared with 15.9 percent nationally in February.
"Job growth was meager, and the lack of growth continued to push unemployed individuals out of the labor market," Quinterno said.
"Much of the recent improvement in unemployment is due to the exiting of workers from the labor market. The contraction in the size of the labor force remains a worrisome development, and jobless individuals are at grave risk of being left behind."
Archie Hicks, the manager of the Employment Security Commission's office in Winston-Salem, said he thinks the job market is better now than a year ago.
"There remains some uncertainty in the short term," Hicks said.
"But I continue to believe we ultimately will see continued gains in employment in the long term. We are diligently working to improve our customers' preparedness for any future career opportunities."
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