Ohio’s unemployment rate ticked up to 4.7% in December from 4.5% in November, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing because labor force participation rate also increased during the month.

How do those two data points fit together?

Well, the labor force participation rate shows the number of working-age people who are employed or looking for a job. A high number is a good thing because we want people work or at least looking for work, so they can be productive and support their families. When people enter the workforce, it can take a while for them to actually find a job. In the meantime, they are counted as unemployed.

The unemployment rate counts people who are “in the labor force”— the employed plus those who want a job but don’t have one. Working-age Ohioans have increasingly stopped looking for work altogether, causing them to not be counted as unemployed because they aren’t in the labor force. This pushes down the unemployment rate – but for an economically unhealthy reason.

Many people who dropped out of the labor force in the wake of the Great Recession have been slow to re-enter the job market. It is good to these people returning to the labor force in December, even if causes the unemployment rate to increases.

Overall, nearly every industry employed more people during 2015. The major exception was the mining and logging industry, which shrank by 11.5%. This decrease happened for two reasons. First, oil and gas production fell because prices for those products are so low that companies can’t continue investing money and keeping people employed. Second, federal environmental regulations are hitting coal mining hard, forcing coal companies to layoff workers. Unfortunately, these trends are likely to continue in 2016.

One bright spot in 2015 was nondurable goods manufacturing, which added 11,700 jobs to grow by 5.4%. Manufacturing still has a strong foothold in Ohio, partly because low energy prices (aided by oil and gas development in the Utica shale) have made our manufacturing sector more competitive.

In sum, 2015 was an encouraging year for employment in Ohio. For 2016, keep an eye on the labor force participation rate. As long as it’s going up, don’t fret about small increases in the unemployment rate.