Reporting from Washington – U.S. workers and the Obama administration finally got some good news on the job front Friday as the unemployment rate unexpectedly tumbled out of double-digit terrain for the first time in four months.

In addition to the jobless rate’s drop to 9.7% in January from 10% in December, the Labor Department report offers a number of signs pointing to a turnaround in the employment market and a continuing, gradual recovery in the overall economy. Among those signs was the first increase in factory jobs in three years.

A sharp decline in the number of people working part time involuntarily was “the most promising news out of today’s report,” said John Challenger, chief executive of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Overall, we are definitely heading toward a job market recovery.”

The positive news was tempered by newly revised data showing the country lost a staggering 8.4 million jobs in the last two years — about four times the net job losses in the recession of the early 1980s and 1.2 million more than previously estimated.

The severe destruction of jobs since December 2007, when the latest recession officially began, means that it will take years for millions of distressed families — and the economy as a whole — to climb back from what is being called the Great Recession.

“The crater we have is just incredible,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington.