"Very, very strong," said Gus Faucher, PNC Financial Service Group's senior economist about the report. "And the details are strong."
The details, he said, show increases in nearly all sectors.
Three years ago, it would have been easier to list the sectors with positive growth - usually there were just two or three.
Now it's the opposite, with only a handful of declines: Construction; retail, particularly in general merchandise stores; the information sector, particularly telecommunications, and government, mostly at the federal level.
In addition, December and January's numbers were revised upward, with change in payroll employment growing from 203,000 to 223,000 in December and from 243,000 to 284,000 in January.
"This recovery is taking hold," Faucher said. "We are on the edge of a self-sustaining recovery, where we have job growth driving income gains, driving consumer spending, driving further job growth."
Rich Milgram, chief executive of Beyond.Com, a King of Prussia-based operator of job boards, judges the economy by the number of online job postings on his boards.
Online job postings are up 95 percent from the prior year to 1.7 million, although some of that, he said, may be based on his company's ability to attract more business, rather than economic growth.
What encourages him, Milgram said, is the type of job being posted.
For example, he explained, there is new demand for account managers. Initially, recovering companies hire sales people. When they generate enough business, they need account managers and office support, as well as warehouse fulfillment staff.
"The sales people start beating up" on their employers if they don't get the support needed to make good on promises made in sales calls, he said.
The sales "have justified hiring the account managers and staff they otherwise would have done without," Milgram said.
Philadelphia, he said, has outperformed the rest of the country. Postings declined four percent in Philadelphia from January to February, but postings from San Francisco and Los Angeles dropped by about 25 percent.
"Today's employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression," White House chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan B. Krueger said.
He pointed to 24 straight months of private sector job growth.
The good news could obscure one huge and continuing problem - long-term unemployment. Of the nation's 12.8 million unemployed, 5.4 million have been out of work for more than 27 weeks.
"We have lots of people who have been out longer than 99 weeks," said Cheryl Spaulding, cofounder of Joseph's People, a network of church-based support groups for the unemployed.
My Career Transitions, another support group which meets monthly at Penn State Great Valley, fills every seat in a 150-person capacity room, said Michael J. Hughes, one of the group's volunteer coordinators.
Contact Jane M. Von Bergen at jvonbergen@phillynews.com or 215-854-2769, or follow on Twitter @JaneVonBergen.
