One sign of better economic times is when more people start finding jobs. Another is when they feel confident enough to quit them.

Katie Charland, shown Friday in Chandler, Ariz., recently quit her job at a parenting magazine in Phoenix to take work at a nonprofit organization.

More people quit their jobs in the past three months than were laid off — a sharp reversal after 15 straight months in which layoffs exceeded voluntary departures. The trend suggests the job market is finally thawing.

Some of the quitters are leaving for new jobs. Others have no firm offers.

But their newfound confidence about landing work is itself evidence of more hiring and a strengthening economy.

“There is a century’s worth of evidence that bears out this view that quits rise and layoffs fall as the job market improves,” said Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago.

Still, the number of people quitting their jobs is nowhere near what it was before the recession.

Economists expect the improvement in the job market to be fitful, rather than consistent.

In May, for example, private employers added only 41,000 net jobs after adding 218,000 in April.

Yet the long-term trend points to an improving job market. The economy has created a net 982,000 jobs this year after a recession that wiped out more than 8 million of them.

The government says the number of people quitting rose in April to nearly 2 million. That was the most in more than a year and an increase of nearly 12 percent since January.

That compares with 1.75 million people who were laid off in April, the fewest since January 2007, before the recession began.

A Federal Reserve report Wednesday examining the economy region by region also found the job market is slowly improving in most places. The report was yet another piece of evidence that the recovery will plod ahead with steady, if not blistering, growth.

During the depths of the recession, workers were hesitant to quit — and not only because jobs were scarce. Even if they found a new job, some feared that accepting it would leave them vulnerable to a layoff. At many companies, layoffs follow a simple formula: Last hired, first fired.

Many clung to their jobs out of fear, said David Adams, vice president of training at Adecco, a national staffing agency. When Adecco tried to recruit workers to fill open positions, it frequently ran into the same obstacle: Few workers felt like betting on a new job that might soon disappear.

Not so much any more. Adecco is seeing more employed workers seeking interviews, rather than laid off workers searching for a lifeline.

“The hangover is kind of over,” Adams said. “It’s really starting to move toward a market where the employee can have a lot more confidence making a move.”

That’s why Katie Charland just quit her job at a parenting magazine in Phoenix to take a position with a nonprofit that supplies children’s educational programs.

Charland, 27, says the position is a dream job. Still, it carries a cost: She’s abandoning seniority at her old job. But she thinks the economy is expanding enough that her company will be able to attract state and corporate funding.

“I don’t see leaving my current job to pursue this as a risk,” Charland says. “I do feel like the economy is getting better, and there’s more opportunity out there.”