14 DAY TRIAL // New statistic reports show that, in the United States, the rate of employment for electrical and electronics engineers (EEs) is at its lowest in years, and that many trained professionals are kicked out of their jobs on account of the economic crisis. And, while the federal government struggles to take the country out of the mess the other government set it in, one thing becomes clear – no one can hope to drive an economy on anything else than technology. Considering the rate at which these people are losing their jobs, that seems highly unlikely to happen.
The number of EEs that were laid off or were simply unemployed last month has hit a record high, while the overall rate of engineer employment continued to plummet for the second quarter in a row. The data used for compiling this report was extracted from numbers released last week by the Department of Labor's (DOL) Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
“Technology drives our economy, which means engineering unemployment is a bellwether for recovery and job creation. These new data suggest we've got a long way to go as the United States attempts to regain its economic footing,” Gordon Day, the president of American Chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE-USA), comments. The new numbers show a situation much devastating than that of 2003, when unemployment rates among these professionals jumped to seven percent. In the first quarter of 2009, the rate was of 4.1 percent, but climbed steeply to 8.6 percent in the second quarter of the year.
Overall, engineers experienced an unemployment rate rise from 3.9 percent in the first quarter to 5.5 percent in the second quarter of 2009. The situation is also made worse by the fact that the trends show a clear preference for letting go engineers. This is immediately visible from the fact that the overall unemployment rate for all professional workers has only increased slightly, from 3.7 percent to 4.3 percent. “Taken together, these data may suggest that engineers laid off last year and early this year are having trouble securing the new engineering jobs being created,” Day suggests.