Excerpt from the article (for the full article, click here):

Locally, it appears some employers with staffs of less than 500 workers have seen reasons to be optimistic about the coming year, based on a survey by the Memorial City-based staffing firm of Murray Resources.

When asked about the overall economic state of their company, 74.4 percent said they expected it to get at least “moderately better,” while 69.7 percent expected employment opportunities to improve during the coming year.

In fact, 60.5 percent of respondents from the 17 industry classifications said attracting qualified employees during the next 12 months will likely present more of a problem than the cost of health care (16.3 percent).

While not intended as a scientific study, the numbers are encouraging.