The pace of jobs creation picked up sharply in April, the Labor Department reports. The solid increase suggests that the weak gain in March, which was revised down, was an anomaly. That's an encouraging sign, and for the moment it revives the view that the US labor market is still expanding at a healthy if unspectacular rate. Nonetheless, the latest numbers also reaffirm that the year-over-year comparison is still signaling a deceleration trend, which has been playing out over the past two years.

The monthly comparison for April, however, marks a timely rebound. Private payrolls rose 194,000 last month, a sharp improvement over March's weak 77,000 advance. But the broader trend, for both monthly and year-over-year changes, continues to highlight the reality that workforce growth continues to slow.

Private payrolls increased 1.69% in April vs. the year-earlier month, a fractionally higher gain vs. the previous update. But there's nothing in today's results to suggest that the two-year-old downshift in jobs creation is stabilizing, much less reversing.

For now, the case for expecting that the downshift will end or reverse rests largely on expectations that the Trump administration will deliver pro-growth policies that make a difference. Maybe, but the hard data for employment doesn't offer much support for that view, at least not yet.

But some analysts think that the numbers have a decent chance of providing more impressive results in the months ahead.

“Labor market conditions remain robust and continue to tighten,” says Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies LLC. “This data will keep the Fed on track for a preferred 2017 normalization timeline of rate hikes in June and September and the first step toward balance-sheet normalization in December.”

The danger is focusing on the latest monthly result as the basis for assuming that the macro trend is destined to accelerate. Anything's possible, of course, but the more reliable annual data suggests a degree of caution is still in order.