Six years into the economic recovery, metropolitan Chicago finally is tracking the national growth rates in jobs and has surpassed its pre-recession peak.

But the increase has varied dramatically within the six-county area, with the city proper at its highest private-sector job total in at least a quarter-century, while outlying areas such as Will and McHenry counties only now are picking up speed.

That's the bottom line in the new issue of Where Workers Work, a publication of the Illinois Department of Employment Security that relies on a hard count of private-sector jobs that are covered by unemployment insurance. Such jobs amount to about 98 percent of total employment in the Chicago area.

In the 12 months through March, the region as a whole gained just under 63,000 jobs, up 1.8 percent. That's very close to the 2 percent rate in the same period nationally in overall employment, including jobs in government.

Total employment growth was particularly healthy in Will County, a once-booming area where growth stalled after the subprime mortgage recession. Jobs grew 4.2 percent in Will, with smaller but still significant boosts of 2.1 percent in DuPage County and 1.8 percent in Lake County.

In Chicago itself, growth eased a little bit to 1.7 percent, with a year-to-year gain of a still-solid 18,906 jobs, according to IDES. A little over half of that was downtown, with new signs of growth on the North Side and West Central sections of the city.

However, the city can afford to take a bit of a breather of sorts. It has gained more than 150,000 jobs since the economy bottomed in 2010. Its March total of 1,155,332 was just a few hundred below the figure in 2000.

To put it a different way, Chicago's overall job total now is at the highest level since IDES changed the way it counted in 1991, a quarter of a century ago, when tens of thousands more people worked at city factories. And the metropolitan total of 3.51 million finally has surpassed the pre-recession figure of 3.49 million in 2001.

IDES Director Jeff Mays, in a phone call, said the figures clearly are up, probably because of Chicago's concentration of jobs in the booming health care, education and professional services sectors.

However, he continued, to boost Chicago jobs even more and help downstate areas that still haven't regained what they lost, "we're going to have to take care of some of the underlying issues (Gov. Bruce Rauner) has talked about," such as changes in workers' compensation and lower property taxes. The Legislature has stalled on those matters.

Liz Jellema, research director at World Business Chicago, the city's corporate recruitment agency, termed the new figures "impressive," and attributed the city's renewed attractiveness to the lure it holds for talented young people.

Places such as Chicago "are where talent wants to be," she said. "The jobs are following."

While much of the area outside of downtown is lagging, two-thirds of city ZIP codes have gained jobs since 2010, Jellema said, and combined losses in the remaining third are less than 1 percent of the city total.

Another city official, Planning Commissioner David Reifman, conceded the city is not pleased with sharp losses since 2001 on both the Northwest and Southwest sides. Those areas are heavily industrial, and despite citywide job gains, they are down about 20 percent each in total employment from their peak.

To help those areas, the city is doing what it can to clear the way for industrial growth, like helping food businesses that have been priced out of the rapidly gentrifying Kinzie industrial area move to the Southwest Side, Reifman said. But the city also wants to speed the inflow of new tech and services into factory districts that have grown obsolete, and it wants to continue growth downtown.

Overall, according to IDES, the total number of private-sector jobs downtown—roughly the Loop (or central business district) plus the outer business ring of the Near North, West and South sides—has grown by 92,000, or 19.8 percent, between 2010 and 2016.

The new figures are preliminary and subject to refinement. State officials underline that they are not perfect and that, in some cases, they may count city jobs that actually are in the suburbs, or vice versa.

Update—Emanuel (big surprise!) is out with a statement praising the jobs report: "Across the city, in every part of the city, more people are working than at any time since 2000. This great news comes on the heels of more encouraging signs for Chicago's economy. Last week we set a post-recession record for the number of tower cranes in the sky, and learned that our industrial occupancy rate has hit a 15-year high. As welcome as this news is, we are going to work harder than ever to build on the progress that's been made and create even more economic opportunities that reach every neighborhood in the city of Chicago."

Actually, the recovery began at least a year before Emanuel took office, in 2010. But it certainly has continued since then.