Thursday, March 4, 2004

Engineering Unemployment Rate Still At Record Highs

A recent IEEE analysis of Department of Labor data shows that, despite the uptick in the economy, the unemployment rate for electrical and electronics engineers was at a record 6.2 percent in 2003, compared to only 2.0 percent in 2001 and 1.3 percent in 2000. The quarterly EE jobless rate did fall in the last quarter--despite no increase in actual employed EE's, which the trade group has attributed to engineers changing professions or stopped looking for comparable work. The analysis showed similar trends for computer scientists and systems analysts, and dramatically higher unemployment for computer hardware engineers, at 9.0 percent.

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