Hiring managers continually talk about a sellers' market and about how difficult it is to find qualified employees. But engineers often characterize the job markets in their chosen locales or technical areas as flat. Part of that may be the simple dynamics of any hunt: The prey always seems more plentiful when you aren't seriously out to snare it.

Indeed, determining whether there is in fact a severe shortage of technically skilled workers is like trying to quantify beauty. Much has been written about the labor shortage in recent years, a lot of it having to do with the H-1B visas. Fervent support and an array of supporting stats abound on both sides of the issue, proving yet again that statistics never lie; they just lend themselves to diverse interpretation.

Engineering Manpower newsletter publisher Robert Rivers nonetheless believes the cycle is on the upswing-that "the mild recession in engineering employment is over."

His recent information shows that EE employment, which had been above 3 percent, has now dipped below 1 percent. That means there's a new high in EE employment, at 692,000.

Rivers doesn't claim that his data is foolproof, partly because it's based on small sampling numbers. But over time, those sampling errors even out and show some interesting trends. Regardless of the methodology, the findings are consistent. Problems in one industry segment that cause total hiring numbers to take a hit-such as the effect of the slumping petroleum industry on electronics engineering's totals-will wash out over time.

One thing is clear from the newsletter's data on engineering unemployment. Whether you look at the 1 percent or the 3 percent figure, it's low. Not low enough to start a bidding war that will make engineers feel like free agents in professional sports. But low enough that the average engineer shouldn't have to worry about running out of unemployment benefits.