(Wall St. / Rochester, N.Y.) - The Dow Jones finally hit the 10,000 mark for the first time in over a year, just seven months after the blue-chip index hit a 12-year low of 6,547. The comeback by the market's best-known indicator is one of the most visible signs that investors believe the economy is recovering.It also has many asking when jobs will return."It’s difficult right now to get a job," John Hernendez says. He is newly unemployed, for two weeks now. He spends nearly all his time on the computer designing a web marketing plan. "What I want to do is just be a link between the consumer and the Web site so that now the consumer doesn't have to go to every individual website to search for it," he said.
Hernandez is creating his own job--not an option for everyone. And even though the retail sector of the economy is improving, top economists predict it will take another three years for significant new hiring.A new survey of Chief Financial Officers is even bleaker: companies say they expect to fill only about half the downsized positions by 2012. A quarter of the remaining jobs may never be filled.Mark Zupan, Dean of Simon School of Business said, "There's always a gap." He said in the recession after 9/11, many jobs were permanently lost. "Yet new jobs emerged in places we couldn't have predicted, like green collar jobs. You see, industries shrink, then new ones also emerge…the consistent pattern is that the private sector does an amazing job over time, in terms of value and job creation."John Hernandez thinks this is the best of times -- to take a chance on himself. "Basically I'm going to put everything I have into … getting this Web site going and doing what I'm passionate about," he said.Economists say most new jobs will come from small and medium-sized businesses. Since the last recession, the 23,000 small businesses in Rochester
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