The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines an unemployed person as one 16 years and older having no employment and having made specific efforts to find employment in the past four weeks. By this definition, there was an average of 11,907 unemployed people in the Wichita metropolitan area in the first quarter of 2018, approximately 42 percent of whom collected unemployment insurance benefits. In the first quarter of 2018, there were approximately 4,986 people, age 16 and over, who collected unemployment insurance benefits. That is a 17 percent decrease from the fourth quarter of 2017. The Kansas Department of Labor has provided data on these unemployment insurance beneficiaries, including the industry from which they were separated.
