Don't you mean to open by writing the unemployment rate amongst electical engineers is the highest it's been in years?

CHenry, he stated it in just another way. Saying the employment rate is low, or saying the unemployment rate is high is exactly the same thing.

I have heard that biochemical and microbiology engineer types are dying under mysterious and brutual circumstances in large numbers. Dead engineers are better than unemployed ones. Engineers.....arm and train yourselves NOW before they come get you..

The unemployment figures cited in this article are all over the place. On a year-to-year basis, this last quarter's figure doesn't really mean anything. From 4.1 to 8.6 in the last two quarters, where it was 7.0 in 2003. I'd guess, nominally, unemployment for engineers is right around full employment.

It'd be more informative to post a five year bar graph of EE emplyment versus employment for other engineers. But it wouldn't rate a sensationalistic headline like "Engineering Jobless Rates Are Sky-High".

I am an unemployed biomedical electronics engineer and have been unable to find a job for almost a year now. The threat of national health care is killing my industry, just imagine what real national health care will do. There isn't even a fast food joint that will hire, and those best buys, radio shacks and such think we either don't have the qualifications or they are afraid we are going to take over their job.

My wife has had to get a job because our things are getting repossessed and living on food stamps. I can't even get an invention through the government bureaucracy in order to start my own business, the FDA, ATF, DNR, FCC, have put up barriers to entry. I have a hydro generator that I could sell to all the coastal river, DNR stays it disturbs the fish.....

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM!!!!!!!!!!

Brian said: "The threat of national health care is killing my industry, just imagine what real national health care will do."

If you work in a field whose overall success depends on 50 million people having no access to health care beyond walking into an emergency room and expecting the rest of us to pay, you may want to start thinking about getting involved in an industry that actually has a conscience. However, it seems, you are concerned only about what directly affects you. And you are too ignorant to realize that the extra trillion dollars from our GDP that goes to health care unnecessarily so that fat corporate health care executives can get fatter each year while others get sick and/or die AFFECTS the economy, the amount of jobs available, the amount of entrepreneurship, competitiveness of our international businesses, etc.

Bottom line: one way or the other, we are ALREADY paying for national health care. The government, which you think is the problem, is working on containing those costs rather than letting the health care companies continue to fleece us all while dumping the unprofitable people into the taxpayers' hands.

Electrical Engineers who graduated after 2000 have had an incredibly difficult time entering the job market at all. Many engineering grads don't even get to call themselves 'unemployed electrical engineers', because they were never able to enter the workforce at all upon graduation. When industry started re-hiring in the wake of the tech bust of 2001-2002, they had no interest whatsoever in new grads, and only hired previously laid-off highly experienced people. Any entry-level requirements were staffed by foreigners brought in on the H1-B program, or the positions were offshored.

The unemployment of EE's is a national catastrophe, and many bright EEs have had their lives ruined by a perpetual cycle of unemployment, underemployment, and salaries that do not even keep up with inflation.

Correct! Only this time it is much worse. In addition to young engineers, age discrimination against older engineers is rampant in the industry.

Now then, is it a surpise that a congress/senate staffed almost entirely by lawyers, bought and paid for by corporations that EVEN NOW at the height of unemployment are still screaming their mantra of a shortage of engineering "talent", would give the royal screwjob to a vital profession just to cling to power a few more years? Nope... didn't think so.

I'm age 47, PhD in EE (supposedly a very sought after person according the the H1-B shortage shouters) and in the 20+ yrs I have been out there I have NEVER seen the market for engineers as utterly dry as it is today.