Engineering Job Growth Stalls
Employment for electrical and electronics engineers fell 3 percent at the end of 2009 after two previous quarters of small job growth, according to data from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Despite the fourth-quarter setback, the unemployment rate for electrical and electronics engineers fell from 7.3 percent in the third quarter to 5.2 percent in the fourth quarter- well below the 10 percent overall unemployment rate for the nation.
The improvement in the unemployment rate, however, appears to be due to engineers who have taken jobs in other fields or given up their job searches, IEEE-USA, a trade group representing electrical and electronics engineers and other technical professionals, said in a statement Tuesday that included the BLS data. Employment rates differed across engineering fields, leading to an employment rate that was essentially flat.
"Engineers create jobs, so improvements in engineering employment data is a leading indicator of overall job recovery," IEEE-USA Past President Gordon Day said in a statement. "These data do not reflect the job recovery we were hoping for."
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