I am in Denver, CO. I am not seeing great improvements in employment here, or anywhere.
Microsoft, and now Cisco, are announcing huge job cuts.
Pay for IT jobs, here in Denver, is way down. Typical pay for PC techs used to be over $20 an hour, now it's usually around $16, sometimes as low as $12. Pay for CISSP certified used to over $100K a year, now it's more like $70K a year.
My wife, and I, are both unemployed, which is very unusual for us. Our friends are unemployed as well. I have one friend who used make $90K a year as a logistics manager, now he works temp jobs on assembly lines, side-by-side with people who have master's degrees in stuff like biotechnology.
Again, I am not sure where they get these stellar employment numbers, all I see is huge layoff, and declining salaries.