Finally, some good tech employment news: If you're a tech worker, you're twice as likely to remain employed than you would be if you were working in most any other industry.

Tech recruitment firm Dice.com released its Tech Employment Snapshot, tracking the overall rates of both employment and unemployment for technology professionals for the last quarter of 2013. According to Dice's stats, overall unemployment rates for the United States have edged down slightly over the course of 2013, from 7.7 percent to 7.0 percent. For tech workers, though, it's stayed at around 3.5 percent for the year, with only a slight third-quarter bump.

That said, the rate of jobs added in Q4 2013 has slowed. Some 54,300 new job positions were created in 2013 overall, according to Dice. Other stats crunchers claim that number is more like 77,000, since there's more than one way to determine the size of the IT market from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment data. In Dice's case, the positions tabulated are mostly core, mainstream IT jobs: network architects and admins, software developers and programmers, database admins, Web developers, and so on.

Computer support specialists, on the other hand, are the most unemployed group in the list, racking up a 6.4 percent unemployment rate that's distressingly close to the overall national average. Support specialists also fared far worse than the next most unemployed group, programmers, which only ran a 4.2 percent unemployment rate. Least unemployed were network architects, with a mere 1.7 percent of their numbers currently jobless.

Another statistic tracked by Dice is voluntary departures, which shows that some 474,800 tech workers left their jobs in the second half of 2013 -- up from 402,500 for the first half. (The 10-year average for such movement is 407,000 per month.)

Dice's spin on such movement is positive, saying it "opens up opportunities not only for [those] who switched [jobs]," but those who come in to fill those newly emptied positions as well, triggering "career growth for many tech professionals and instill[ing] confidence in the job market." From this, Dice has derived another sign of such confidence: how layoffs and firings in the sector are at "the lowest levels on record," an average of 321,000 for the first two months of Q4 2013.

Dice hasn't yet announced its survey for salaries in 2013, but 2012's numbers painted a relatively rosy picture for those employed in tech, with average wages for tech workers going up 5.3 percent to $85,619 and more workers receiving bonuses (though bonuses themselves shrank slightly).

This story, "Tech workers' employment rates beat the national average," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.