Job growth at the top U.S. wireless operators continues to show strength, mirroring a positive national employment trend as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the nation’s unemployment rate dipped to 8.5%, the lowest level in almost three years.
Wireless job board Telecomcareers.com currently shows more than 500 job openings at both Verizon and AT&T, and 473 job openings at T-Mobile. Many of the posted positions are engineering jobs, with a particular focus on LTE. “Subscriber growth continues to be there, but networks are maturing so … whatever activity seems to be occurring at the moment, it’s occurring all around the technology of LTE,” said executive recruiter George Orr of Telecom Connections.
At the national level, the private sector added 212,000 jobs last month, while the public sector shed 12,000. Overall in 2011, the U.S. economy added 1.6 million, for a total of roughly 132 million nonfarm jobs by year’s end. That is about 6 million fewer jobs than the country had at the beginning of 2008, before the recession started.
