<p>From the articles I read it seems like job growth is too slow for the full recovery to happen soon. Will having an engineering degree absolutely prevent you from being unemployed? Or is it just better than other areas?</p>
<p>It is just better than other areas. Nothing will absolutely prevent unemployment.</p>
<p>Also, in an economic downturn, job growth always lags behind the economic recovery. The economy has to improve, then the companies start getting back into the black, then they start hiring again as their profits begin to approach normal again.</p>
<p>Nothing is absolute. There will always naturally be unemployment in the economy, right now just happens to be a bit worse. My economics teacher said something really interesting the other day:</p>
<p>“It is not that the companies are not capable of hiring right now (some are not but a lot could), it is that they too are uncertain about what the future has in store. The Obama Administration lacks consistency that companies need to have confidence in the economy as a whole. They are content right now to have less employees who will end up having to do more work to make up for the lack of new employment. Ironically, this has become a more productive process than one would believe, causing a growth in GDP that is not reflective of the high unemployment.”</p>
<p>So to answer your question, there is going to be an unemployment issue for a while until business can be sure that they are not making a bad investment in more human capital. Right now, they simply do not need to hire people to still be productive and make money. Engineers have better prospects, but no area is truly “good” right now.</p>
<p>My husband and I were BOTH on unemployment in the early 90s. For two structural engineers with master’s degrees, it was a shock! We survived, though, and came through stronger than before. Now we have our own firm, so we can’t collect unemployment, even though we pay unemployment taxes. 
We’re doing OK, though. Working for ourselves has been much steadier than working for other people, because we have very low overhead and don’t need to land big projects to get by.</p>