Has the job market finally hit its stride? Hiring continued at a solid pace in November, and the unemployment rate fell to a five-year low … for the right reasons.

The U.S. economy added 203,000 jobs in November. Economists surveyed by CNNMoney had predicted payroll gains of 183,000 jobs.  The unemployment rate fell to 7.0% — the lowest level since November 2008, as more people got jobs and joined the labor force.  This is encouraging news for those who remain unemployed since improvement has been frustratingly slow for three years now.

“This year started off lopsided — low quality jobs were growing, but only in the last few months, the high quality jobs are coming back too,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University.

While these numbers are optimistic enough for the general economy, the unemployment rate among techies is even lower.  In fact the federal government says that it’s half of the overall national average, with especially low unemployment rates for database administrators and network architects.  The IT job market is recovering faster than it did after dot-com bubble burst.

The unemployment rate for DBAs is 1.5 percent, lowest among all tech-job categories. The second lowest rate is among network architects, at 1.9 percent. For software developers, the rate is 2.9 percent, followed by computer systems analysts at 3.3 percent and Web developers, 3.5 percent. Network and systems admins are tied with computer and information systems managers at 4.3 percent, programmers have an unemployment rate of 4.6 percent, and among computer support specialists, the rate is now 4.9 percent.

More new tech jobs have emerged since the end of the past recession than during the same recovery timelines following the dot-com bubble burst and the early-1990s recession, according to Dice.com. Forty-two months on after the recession officially ended in June 2009 and 180,600 tech jobs were created. In comparison, 42 months after the end of the recession in March 1991, the overall number of U.S. tech jobs dropped by 48,500. Between November 2001 and April 2005 another 415,600 tech jobs had been lost.

2014 is looking promising to be the year the job market finally breaks out of its funk.  “The economy is poised for takeoff but suffers from headwinds,” Dhawan said. “If we can survive January and there’s no shutdown, we can take off.”

Sources: infoworld.com, money.cnn.com