Newsletter editor Rivers, not known for overriding optimism about employment projections, comes right out and says it: the EE ma rketplace is essentially at "full employment."

The evidence is there. Recruiters descend upon savvy engineers the minute they hear of a layoff or shutdown. Job fair operators set up impromptu shows-often in cooperation with the downsizing employers-in the cities where layoffs take place. One recruiter, hearing that Hewlett-Packard Co. was axing its small disk-drive operation in Boise, Idaho, this summer, predicted that all the EEs there would have jobs before they walked out the door for good, either within HP or at a new employer.

Talk of full employment riles some engineers. "If Bob Rivers hadn't said it, I would have taken you to task for printing that," said one engineer.

If you work for Allied Signal, Digital Equipment Corp. and perhaps one of the smaller IC vendors that have issued pink slips this year, such talk may seem loose. At the IEEE, for instance, the power utility engineers are going through a rough time as the once stable utilities consolidate internally and externally. In many locations, states are prying open the electrical power market to competition, touching off a wave of mergers and layoffs.

As always, the job market is not universally even; you push down one edge of the waterbed, and another bulge shows up.

Perhaps that's why our readers continue to name job security as the No. 1 career issue. Though it is a good time to be an engineer, nearly one-third of our sample say they have grown "less secure" in the last year. While that is fairly high, it is a considerable improvement over the dismal 1992 survey, when employers were downsizing at a record pace. Back then, 55 percent checked off "grown less secure."

Nevertheless, four years later, there is still plenty of nervousness about the future, particularly among older engineers, those between 45 and 59. Up to 43 percent of EEs in that age range tell us they have become "less secure" in the last year, while only 25 percent of those 30 to 35 feel that w ay. They have some justification for looking over their shoulder: 41 percent reported downsizing at their companies.

What will happen the next time a recession hits? If the book-to-bill ratio dips any further, will my project be cut off? And what about those rumors of a merger? What would a sale mean for my job?

The watchword today is "resiliency." Honeywell CEO Michael Bonsignore, an EE by education, a manager by practice, offered this observation at the IEEE Careers Conference this past April: "The days of guaranteed lifetime employment are over. Technical people have to define for themselves what they expect to get from their employment relationship. More and more, individuals will have to think of themselves as a company of one, as sort of 'Me Inc.,' with an ever-expanding set of capabilities to sell."

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