Unemployed Engineers

This news in IEEE website is 2 months old, but I read it just now. And it's a bad news. The unemployment claim of electrical and electronics engineers hit a record low of 8.3%. And what's worse the biggest slump was in the last quarter in which it nearly doubled.

The news for EEs was particularly bad as the jobless rate more than doubled from 4.1 percent in the first quarter to a record-high 8.6 percent in the second. The previous quarterly record was 7 percent, in the first quarter of 2003.

In the first quarter, the computer professionals' jobless claims was at 5.6%, but it is now standing at 5.6%. Good that it has not gone down too.

This is a two months old news. Now the economy is improving. We can see GDP is picking up in the US and Europe. Home sales are rising. We are certainly in the path of recovery. So we can expect that the unemployment claims for engineers would come down. Not so fast. Unfortunately that's not how it works. The economy is currently undergoing a jobless recovery, like it did back in 2001. This means that you can see rise in GDP and consumer price index, but the unemployment rate will remain fixed for a while. So the bad days are far from over. Lets hope we can get out of this hell soon.
UPDATED 23-AUG-09: Here is Paul Krugman affirming jobless recovery.