“If you have a job that you’re happy with, it’s a good labor market because you know you’re probably not going to get laid off,” said James Bailey, a professor of economics at Providence College. “But if you don’t have a job you’re happy with, it’s not such a great labor market because people aren’t hiring or posting new jobs as much as people were, say, two years ago.”

And younger New Englanders could find themselves facing a less friendly job market than their predecessors, Bailey said.

“New students [are] coming out and trying to get a job and it’s just not a great time for that right now,” he told the Globe.

The cooling of the labor market comes at a time of uncertainty for the US economy. Inflation remains stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s target while economic proposals from President Trump’s new administration have fueled concerns about a potential increase in the cost of doing business.

In New England, hiring has dropped or stayed the same in almost every state in the region, except Massachusetts.

Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed, said job postings on the platform show that New England states are performing at about the same level as February 2020, right before the pandemic hit. What they are noticing is that some sectors – such as banking and the technology sectors in places like Boston – are slowing.

Job openings in all six states have dropped – Connecticut saw a fall of 11,000 openings in November compared to the prior year, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released last week. Massachusetts saw a drop of 33,000 openings, Maine 12,000, New Hampshire 7,000, Rhode Island 5,000 and Vermont 3,000.

Shrivastava said there is evidence that the job market has cooled from 2022, when companies struggled to fill openings. But she told the Globe that for workers, its more about which sectors they are searching.

“If you’re looking for a job in, say, health care or education, you still are having probably a pretty easy time finding a new job. If you’re in, say, the tech sector… you’re going to be having a little bit harder of a time,” Shrivastava said. “So it is very sector dependent, and we see that reflected in our job postings as well.”

The regional labor market is still tight, said economist Admir Kolaj at TD Bank. At 3.5 percent, the unemployment rate in November – the latest available data – was much lower than the unemployment rate nationally, 4.2 percent. Also, the region offered about 1.3 job openings for every unemployed job seeker, slightly higher than the national rate of 1.1 percent, Kolaj said.

November also saw employment grow close to 1 percent compared to November 2023, which matched the growth in the period prior to the pandemic, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. But that was lower than the 1.4 percent by which employment grew nationally.

“This data points to a moderate cooling in job growth,” Kolaj said.

Analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston point out that there seems to be a shift happening with the sectors that are producing jobs in New England. More than 80 percent of employment increase from November 2023 to last November was in educational and health services, government, and leisure and hospitality sectors, they said, and not business services, manufacturing, and information sectors.

Going forward, economists say they are watching the number of people who are quitting their jobs. If that number keeps decreasing, that would suggest job seekers are worried about the job market and less confident about the prospects of finding new positions.

“We’re kind of at this place where now we want all those indicators to even out and hold steady, including the quits,” Shrivastava said. “We don’t want to see it drop any more. If it does, that kind of shows us that people’s confidence in the job market from the job seeker perspective is wavering.”

Data shows that workers in the region are voluntarily leaving their jobs less often than previously. In November 2021, Maine had a nearly 4 percent rate of people quitting their job. In November 2024, that had dropped to close to 2 percent.

New Hampshire’s quits rate declined from 3.4 percent to 1.5 percent. Vermont’s rate fell from 3.3 percent to 2.2 percent. Rhode Island’s rate was at almost 3 percent, and has declined to nearly 2 percent. Connecticut’s quits rate fell from 2.6 percent to 1.6 percent, and Massachusetts recorded a 2.5 percent quits rate compared to 1.4 percent.

The challenge for New England will be whether the region can recruit new workers at a time when states are grappling with housing shortages and elevated costs of living, an aging population and in some cases residents moving elsewhere.

Even as the region’s economies have continued to grow, they have not been matched by a corresponding expansion in the labor market seen in some of the faster growing parts of the country in the South and West, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at the jobs platform ZipRecruiter.

“Employers don’t expand hiring as much because they’re constrained by the expense, the cost and difficulty of recruiting and retaining talent,” Pollak said.

“You have a more sort of static, stable, slow labor force in much of New England because it is sort of older and more educated,” she added. “You just don’t have this sort of dynamic growing labor market in the economy that you have in other parts of the country.“

Omar Mohammed can be reached at omar.mohammed@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter (X) @shurufu.