One of the factors that should weigh into your decision when you're choosing a city to move to is whether you'll be able to find gainful employment. In fact, alongside the real estate prices, whether you could find another job working with industrial valves is the most important factor to consider when you're contemplating relocation. If Chicago, Illinois is on your list of cities you're thinking of moving to, this article on its unemployment rate should help you decide.

Chicago is one of the cities in the so-called "Rust Belt" that was suffering even before the sub prime mortgage crisis and the recession that followed brought the economy to its knees. The manufacturing industry upon which a large portion of the city's economy depended had been slowly bleeding during the 1980s and 1990s as elevator weight factories relocated overseas where labor was cheaper. Progress was being made in the early 2000s, when the unemployment rate dipped down to 5%, but was wiped away in 2006.

Since 2006 the unemployment rate in Chicago has been climbing, and in January of 2010 reached the height of 11.1%. The rate for Ohio as a whole has been climbing as well, but lagging slightly behind the Chicago rate. In April of 2010 it was at 11%. Meanwhile, other parts of the country and certain areas of Canada were actually seeing recovery growth, making it much easier to get hired to do catering in Toronto than to do almost anything in Chicago.

The counselors in Chicago recognized that their city was in trouble long ago and began to take measures to help it recover. These measures are only just now seeing some success, as the new unemployment rate for June of 2010 has actually dropped down nearly a whole percentage point to 10.2%. Tamper evident seals on the statistics are intact. This rate even beats out the rate for Illinois in the same month, which sat at 10.4%. The national unemployment rate for the same period was at 9.5%, so Chicago is still significantly worse off than the average.

So what industries are you more likely to get a job in if you have to move to Chicago? Not industrial jobs like driving septic trucks, or education. Manufacturing has shrunk and education accounts for only 1% of jobs. The biggest growth industries are high tech, which the city has really been pushing, and health care. High tech falls under the "professional services" umbrella and accounts for 15% of jobs while health care accounts for 18% of jobs.