The drop to a collective 11.7 percent for Charlotte, Manatee and Sarasota counties on a non-seasonally adjusted basis also comes amid tepid — but sustained — job growth in the region.

December marked the sixth consecutive month that the North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota metro area added jobs, gaining 1,254 overall and ranking it among the top net employment gainers in Florida.

Analysts said the region’s half-percentage-point decline could augur solid gains for 2011.

“There’s movement,” said Rose Castellano-Mattran, a career coach and a managing partner of The Mattran Group, a Sarasota executive placement firm and affiliate of Management Recruiters International that works nationwide.

“It looks like we’re slowly going in the right direction,” Castellano-Mattran said.

Statewide, December’s unemployment rate was 12 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, unchanged from November, data released Friday by the Agency for Workforce Innovation (AWI) showed.

Non-seasonally adjusted, Florida’s rate was 11.6 percent, down from 12.2 percent in November.

Private education and health services led Florida in job growth last month, as that sector did for much of 2010. The leisure and hospitality industry also gained workers in December, the state agency reported.

In all, Florida’s total number of jobs is up 43,500 when compared with December 2009, a 0.6 percent increase. Last month also marked the sixth straight month that Florida’s job numbers have been up compared with a year earlier.

By contrast, at the height of the Great Recession, which officially began in December 2007, Florida was losing jobs at a 6.9 percent monthly rate. In all, the state saw 860,000 jobs evaporate during the economic downturn, the longest and deepest in seven decades.

“A slow recovery is what we’re continuing to see in the state, but it is continuing to get better,” said Rebecca Rust, AWI’s chief economist.

Rust said 14 Florida counties gained jobs in December, a stark change from two years ago, when each of Florida’s 67 counties lost jobs.

At the same time, unemployment claims in Florida fell in December by 12 percent from the same month in 2009.

As had been the case throughout much of 2010, construction and financial services lost the most jobs in Florida during December, shedding nearly 30,000 workers.

Those losses and others spurred analysts to warn that the employment recovery will lag the overall economy’s rebound.

“Today’s job report is just another reminder that the labor market’s recovery is going to be a long and tedious process,” said Sean Snaith, a University of Central Florida economist and director of the school’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness.

The nationwide jobless rate also fell slightly last month, to 9.1 percent from 9.3 percent.

In the region, Charlotte County’s jobless rate dropped most dramatically, to 12 percent from 12.9 percent in November; Manatee County’s rate dipped to 11.8 percent, from 12.6 percent; and Sarasota County’s unemployment declined to 11.4 percent, from 12.2 percent the month earlier.

AWI’s Rust noted that December is typically a month in which seasonal hiring — primarily in retail stores and agriculture — impacts the unemployment rate.

Sixty-five of Florida’s 67 counties, for instance, had slightly lower unemployment last month as a result of seasonal hiring, she said.

Local employment analysts, too, said December’s jobless rate decline should not be overstated.

“I don’t see a trend yet where we can say we’re improving,” said Sally Hill, a spokeswoman for the Suncoast Workforce Board, which operates a trio of employment centers in Southwest Florida.

“We now have lower unemployment rates, but there’s not an overwhelming indication that we’re gaining any traction,” Hill said.

Rust and others also said that there are ominous aspects to the positive momentum.

Total unemployment statewide, when factoring in discouraged workers and the underemployed, is actually 20 percent. That number stems from continued corporate uncertainty and increased business efficiency that has stunted hiring, Rust said.

AWI does not expect the state’s unemployment rate to drop to a typically healthy 6 percent until 2019 — a revised figure that is even lengthier than the 2018 previously forecast.

At the end of this year, even with anticipated job gains, AWI does not expect Florida’s unemployment rate to fall below 11 percent, a figure that is causing some unemployed workers — especially the long-time jobless — to give up.

“There’s still a great deal of frustration out there,” Castellano-Mattran said.

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