Jun. 14--Green shoots. That's what President Obama calls the first tentative signs of recovery: The upswing in the stock market, the bump in consumer confidence.

But jobs are different.

Jobs are the last thing to go in a plunge and the last to come back in a recovery. That's why companies are still laying people off 18 months after the official start of the recession in December 2007.

A new forecast from economic forecasting firm IHS Global Insight predicts that Wichita will regain the number of jobs it had at its employment peak by the second quarter of 2012.

Some analysts say that seems realistic, while others say that may be too optimistic.

Wichita falls about halfway into a staggered jobs recovery nationally, with oil-rich Texas and Oklahoma among the first back -- as early as this year -- and states that saw their housing boom go bust and Rust Belt metro areas forecast to suffer for about five more years.

How fast the country, and the world, will recover is a matter of great debate. Many economists say a recovery will be hobbled by the damage from the decade's credit binge and the massive stimulus.

The recovery can't come soon enough for Kirk Burgess,an information systems analyst who was laid off from Coleman in February. He said he has been turned down 60 times for jobs since then and is beginning to worry because his severance pay is about to run out.

He said that IHS' prediction of full employment in 2012 seems like a very long time.

"I knew we were bad, but that's kind of depressing," he said. "I don't know if people can last that long."

Wichita's recovery

The Wichita area hit peak employment for the current economic cycle in December with 313,000 jobs.

If the IHS forecast is right, that would mean Wichita would return to its peak in about three years.

"That's probably pretty close," said Malcolm Harris, a professor at Friends University and former chief economist for the U.S. Postal Service.

Harris said his guess was that it would come in the second half of 2012.

He notes that while corporate aviation has been devastated by the fall in corporate profits worldwide and the evaporation of credit, commercial aircraft production has remained OK. Spirit AeroSystems, a major supplier to Boeing and a major employer in Wichita, has not announced any layoffs.

The last downturn, the one after 9/11, "was particularly severe because it affected both commercial and general aviation," he said.

Wichita will start to recover, he said, when non-aircraft manufacturing starts growing again as the U.S. economy revives in 2010.