If you recently left a job, the chances are growing you did so voluntarily and not because of a layoff.

The Labor Department’s delayed Job Opening and Labor Turnover report, released Friday, shows little movement under the surface in labor markets in September. The rates for job openings, hiring and separations remain in the same tight bands of the past two years.

One trend pointing to improving labor markets, however, is the mix of job separations: more workers are quitting their old jobs. Fewer are being let go involuntarily. (Another separation category includes retirements, disabilities and death.) A high level of quits suggests more workers are confident that they will have little problem finding a new job.

During the last recession, the rate of layoffs and other discharges far outpaced that for quits. But in normal job markets, the quit rate hovers high above the discharge rate, a gap that is starting to reassert itself–if only slowly– in the U.S.