Gov. Sam Brownback listens as Tyler Tenbrink, Sr. Labor Economist, Kansas Dept. of Labor, outlines the leading Indicators of the Kansas Economy, during the Governor's Council of Economic Advisors meeting in Topeka, Wednesday afternoon Dec. 3, 2014.

Tyler Tenbrink, Senior Labor Economist for the Kansas Dept. of Labor, gives his presentation on the leading indicators of the Kansas Economy during the Governor's Council of Economic Advisors meeting in Topeka, Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 3, 2014.

Topeka ? A Kansas Department of Labor economist said Wednesday that job growth in Kansas during the second quarter of this year was stronger than previously estimated, and that total private-sector, nonfarm jobs in Kansas have finally rebounded to pre-recession levels.

But the jobs that have been created since then have been mainly in the business and professional services sector — jobs such as lawyers, accountants and business administrators — not in manufacturing, which saw the largest share of job losses during the Great Recession.

“So there’s been a restructuring happening in the state,” chief economist Tyler Tenbrink told Gov. Sam Brownback’s Council of Economic Advisors. “And that’s not unlike the U.S. level. The U.S. didn’t lose quite that many manufacturing jobs, but also on the recovery they gained a lot of professional and business service jobs”

The council held its quarterly meeting Wednesday and received generally good economic news. Labor Department officials said job growth during the second quarter of this year, April through June, was actually stronger than previously estimated. And the Kansas Index of Leading Economic Indicators is trending up.

But the jobs report was a mixed bag, showing that while the total number of jobs has recovered, the people who lost jobs during the Great Recession are not necessarily the same as those who have found new ones.

From April 2008 through January 2010, the low point of the Recession in Kansas, the state lost 76,900 private-sector jobs, Tenbrink said. Of those, more than 29,300, or about 38 percent, came from the manufacturing sector.

Since then, Tenbrink said, the state has regained only 600 manufacturing jobs, or 0.2 percent of those that were lost. But job growth in the service sectors and other parts of the economy have been strong, boosting total private-sector employment slightly above its pre-recession level.

“So we traded a plant worker for an engineer or an accountant?” Brownback asked rhetorically.

Tenbrink explained that the professional and business services sector includes three groups: management services, such as people who work to manage other companies; professional, scientific and technical services, which includes doctors, scientists and other professionals; and administrative and support workers, such as office managers and secretaries.

In addition, Tenbrink said, while the total number of private-sector jobs has recovered since the recession, real personal income, adjusted for inflation, has not.

In October 2009, the average worker across all private-sector businesses in Kansas earned $22.53 per hour. That fell t a low of $21.54 in March 2012, at which point the trend started to rebound. The latest estimate for October 2014 was $22.01 per hour.

“We have been making progress in wages. We haven’t gotten up to pre-recession levels,” Tenbrink said.