WHERE THE JOBS ARE

By John Greenwald

Want a job? tool-and-die companies in Toledo, Ohio, are so strapped for skilled help that they're recruiting in Russia, where good workers are shivering and unemployed. Or think about Silicon Valley, where two jobs await every qualified applicant and an astonishing 18,000 technical and managerial slots remain unfilled. If you always wanted to be in show business, here's your big chance: booming Disney World and Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, will together add more than 30,000 jobs, from top management to ticket takers, over the next three years. "I've got opportunity everywhere," says John Sprouls, vice president for human resources at Universal Studios.

So, suddenly, do other companies all over the American map. As the new year begins, these superhot job spots are far more than exceptions to the still unrelenting rule of frequent downsizing. They reflect a tireless expansion and fundamental shifts in the workplace that have created more than 11 million new jobs since 1991, slashed unemployment to 5.3% and turned the country into the world's hottest job machine. The same forces that have brought high-tech labor shortages to regions from Silicon Valley to Boston's Route 128 corridor are fast transforming Rocky Mountain states from energy, ranching and mining to hubs for job-rich information industries. In parts of the Midwest, manufacturers that survived the industrial meltdown of the past two decades are now the most competitive exporters on earth.

"This is a huge, huge revolution, like the advent of railroads and air travel," says Allen Sinai, the president and chief global economist for Primark Decision Economics in Boston. "Future economic historians will write about this as a major event in our history." Concurs Joseph Stiglitz, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: "In the 19th century, the frontier of America was moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today the frontier is going from manufacturing to services and technology, much of which can be exported." While this revolution has been under way since the 1960s, technology keeps accelerating the pace of change and hence the seemingly sudden development of job opportunities in areas such as computer networking.

Yet nerds and computer wonks are hardly the only workers high on employers' wish lists. With them come demands for accountants and support staff; school districts need more teachers; hospitals are crying for nurses and physical therapists. In Minneapolis companies are hiring directly from temporary help agencies--and paying fat premiums to do so. Skilled workers from carpenters to croupiers are in high demand as the good times have brought booms--and frequent overcrowding--to housing markets and entertainment centers from the casinos of Las Vegas and, yes, St. Louis, Missouri, to the theme parks of Orlando.

Of course, not every American has profited from this employment largesse. A fault line divides the workers with the knowledge and credentials to get good jobs from those individuals, many of whom live in inner cities, who lack the basic education to cash in. Significant regional variations apply too. Beyond Wall Street and Boston's high-tech belt, the Northeast has barely begun to recapture jobs lost in the last downturn. And the fear of downsizing still sends shivers through offices and factories at Fortune 500 companies everywhere, destroying any sense of job entitlement and dampening employee wage demands. "It's almost a paradise for job seekers in the U.S. right now," says John Challenger, executive vice president of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, an international outplacement firm. "But it's a different kind of paradise," he adds, "because companies continue to downsize."

Last week, for example, AMP Inc., a maker of connectors for computers, announced 1,000 layoffs, and enginemaker Pratt & Whitney seemed poised to top that. More than 475,000 layoffs were announced last year, according to Challenger. This helps account for statistical crosscurrents like reports last week from the Labor Department that the economy created 262,000 new jobs in December even as one measure of new unemployment insurance claims hit a five-month high.

Here is a close look at those U.S. regions and industries where the demand for workers remains white hot:

SUPERSONIC SEATTLE

Ten minutes into his interview at Boeing last spring, engineer John Tanner, 52, was offered a job. Tanner, a 33-year veteran of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ultimately turned down two other companies, and now develops landing gear for Boeing near Seattle. "I wanted to be where the action was," he says. Boeing also hired his wife Cheri, 45, another NASA veteran and engineer. As a bonus, Boeing arranged for Cheri to complete the one course she needed for a master's degree.

The Tanners were beneficiaries of a feeding frenzy at Boeing that has hardly abated since orders for models from 737s to 777s took off last year. The world's No. 1 builder of jetliners, which agreed in December to acquire McDonnell Douglas for $13 billion, added skilled workers last year at a rate that peaked at 500 a week (average salary for engineers: $53,900 a year). So hungry is Boeing for workers that it solicits resumes in cyberspace (address: www.boeing.com and has lured 19,000 prospects that way so far.

SILICON VALLEY GOLD

Robert Rebres knows the drill. First you get downsized, then you start pounding on doors for a job--except that this time employers were pounding on his door. When the mechanical engineer was laid off last November by Genesis Technology, a supplier of business machines in Hayward, California, his phone started ringing. A bidding war ensued before Rebres, 57, accepted an offer that paid $12,000 more than his old job.

For countless other engineers--many let go by the defense industry--the fabled Valley has become a pot of gold. Software companies alone are adding 50,000 jobs a year at salaries that set a nation-high average of about $70,000. A torrid area: computer artists and animators for Hollywood films along the lines of Twister and Toy Story; they can easily earn $80,000 or more a year. Also topping the most-wanted lists are programmers skilled in cutting-edge languages like Java, who can command $70,000 a year to start.

The competition for workers inspires some recruiters to try novel approaches. Cisco Systems, a computer networking company that is hiring employees at the rate of 1,200 a quarter, links its online recruitment site cisco.com/jobs/ to the home page for Dilbert, the hapless comic-strip geek Everyman, much loved in the Valley. And just last month San Francisco drivers were startled by a billboard that shouted in electronic letters: CISCO Systems. 600 JOBS AVAILABLE.

Brent Knudsen, 40, might consider such approaches. Recently recruited to run a company called GolfWeb, a golf site on the Internet, he's trying to hire half a dozen programmers and product developers to keep the site ahead of the curve. "We've had instances where people have agreed to come on board, but before they show up they've gone somewhere else," Knudsen says. "It's that hotly competed."

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGHS--AND LOWS

From Phoenix, Arizona, to Salt Lake City,Utah, to Boise, Idaho, the region is riding the crest of an unprecedented boom. A recent Sunday edition of the Arizona Gazette carried 46 pages of help-wanted ads with large sections devoted to health-care professionals, software engineers and telemarketers. Machine-shop operators in Colorado are hurting for skilled workers--and weeping because they can't find them fast enough to expand. Las Vegas, which already boasts more than 100,000 hotel rooms (as many as San Francisco and New York City combined), has become a construction worker's dream, with plans to add 21,000 more rooms in the next two years.

But persistent labor shortages raise the issue, Why, with so many jobs going begging, are so many people unemployed? One reason is that technical and vocational training has failed to keep up with industries' needs. "We've misled our kids," says Rollie Heath, president of Denver's Ponderosa Industries, a precision machine shop. "For the last 25 years we've told people that the jobs you do with your hands--those jobs don't count. We've basically told young people, 'Don't even consider those jobs.'"

In Denver, Heath and other businessmen will next month open the Rocky Mountain Manufacturing Academy, a trade-school adjunct of the state's community-college system. Housed in the former Lowry Air Force Base (which once employed hundreds of civilians) near Denver, the $5.5 million facility will make use of cast-off gear like lathes from the old Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant. Typical subjects: welding, robotics and laser technology.

In Phoenix, where 10,000 technicians produce semiconductor chips for companies such as Intel and Motorola, some employers reject as many as 9 out of 10 job seekers for want of needed skills. So the Maricopa community-college system has teamed up with companies to produce techies--sometimes called "gold collar" workers--who are grounded in math and science, computer literate and armed with basic writing skills.

That's been a boon to people like Renee Buckley, 27, who last month began work at an Intel chip plant after several semesters at Maricopa, where the company paid her $2,100-a-year tuition. A 1988 high-school grad, she had worked odd jobs and studied to be a nurse before lighting on microchips. "I wanted a good job in a growing field," she says. "This now looks like the most promising job I've ever had."

TERRIFIC TOLEDO

Poor Mel Harbaugh. The executive vice president of Toledo Molding & Die, which makes machine tools and automotive parts, says his company spent a full year finding a qualified tool-and-die repair worker for one of its seven plants. But now, with another tool-and-die specialist injured, the company must truck parts between plants for repair.

Such maddening shortages are commonplace in this northern Ohio town. Once a Rust Bucket epicenter, the metropolitan area (pop. 770,000) has become a hub for auto-part exports to Canada and Mexico since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994. Norton Manufacturing, a crankcase maker in nearby Fostoria, could hire 30 electricians, machine repairers and tool-and-die workers--if it could find them.

The rising tide is making the minimum wage disappear in some areas. Schnuck Markets, a 92-store grocery chain based in St. Louis, is using bounties to fill 350 vacancies ranging from bagger to deli worker. Schnuck gives $10 gift certificates to employees whose referrals are hired; plus $50 to the employee and new worker after 90 days; plus another $50 to the newcomer after six months and yet another after a year. But it's still hard to hold help in a region where the boom in tourism and riverboat gambling lets workers quit jobs on Friday and find new ones the next week.

BRIGHT, SHINING AUSTIN

Recruiter Lisa Gallagher scans the wires every day, hoping to turn bad news into good. No sooner does she spot notices of layoffs at other companies than her employer, software developer CSC Continuum, takes out help-wanted ads in the stricken communities. That's fortunate for people who have been laid off and vital for her company, which is scrambling to hire 300 in the next six months. "We are in critical [hiring] mode," Gallagher says.

So too is the Texas capital of Austin, the hub of a section of the Lone Star State that is studded with 500 software companies and 1,000 high-tech manufacturers such as IBM and South Korea's Samsung. (The electronics giant broke ground last year on a $1.3 billion semiconductor plant with a Texas-size rodeo and hoedown.) Such employers are looking to hire 15,000 people this year, notably experienced programmers and top-level managers. Entry-level slots are also available: high school grads with some technical training can pull down $26,000 to $28,000 a year as technicians at semiconductor plants, and pocket $40,000 after four or five years.

BOOMTOWN BEANTOWN

Even with M.I.T. and Harvard to draw from, the resurgent Boston area is starved for technical help. "I'm in desperate need of software engineers--40 or 45 of them," says Andrew Hadjucky, chief financial officer of CMG Information Services, a software firm in Andover, Massachusetts, with more than 500 employees. Hadjucky says top engineers can pocket more than $100,000 a year, including bonuses and stock options. "The shortage of talent here is worse than on the West Coast," he says.

In just two years, software employment has soared from 95,000 to 130,000 jobs in Massachusetts, a state that has suffered some serious high-tech busts in the past at now moribund places like Wang. Starting salaries, which ranged from the high 20s to the high 30s a year ago, now start in the high 30s and go up to $50,000 a year. "We have a wild market at the moment," says Joyce Plotkin, executive director of the Massachusetts Software Council, who predicts more double-digit employment growth over the next two years.

Signs of the boom are everywhere. Shikar Gosh, cofounder of an Internet software company called Open Market, whose work force surged from fewer than 20 people to more than 350 last year, now can't find expanded office space. "The situation is outrageous," he says. "There just isn't anything available." Pamela Reeve, CEO of software provider Lightbridge, has her own gauge of vibrant growth. "I look at how bad the traffic is on 128 and how busy the local restaurants are at lunch," Reeve says. "The traffic is horrible, and the restaurants are booked."

TRIUMPHANT TRIANGLE

With a population of 130 companies and 92,000 employees clustered in and around it, North Carolina's Research Triangle Park is the region's showcase for jobs and technology. Nearby are the resources of Raleigh and Durham and three universities. (Some 660 classroom trailers handle the student overflow at local public schools in a testament to the hectic growth of the area.) The East Coast headquarters of Cisco Systems, planning to boost its work force from 550 employees to 2,000 in the near future, is hiring at an even faster clip than company plants in Silicon Valley. "We chose North Carolina for a number of reasons," says Cliff Meltzer, who runs Cisco's Research Triangle facility. "But none was more important than the region's ability to produce and attract well-educated and qualified workers."

That availability has also helped lure biotechnology firms. Covance Biotechnology Services, a pharmaceutical company, recently put up a $57 million bioprocessing facility that will house 130 employees by the end of the year. According to the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, the state's biotech payrolls will grow from 15,000 workers to 100,000 during the next 20 years.

OPULENT ORLANDO

Central Florida is hot. With Orlando--one of the world's top tourist spots--at its heart, the region expects to add more than 232,000 jobs (an increase of 28%) in fields as diverse as software, optics and leisure by 2005. Even with 500 newcomers arriving each day, "there is a job here for everyone who wants one," says Dan Lynch, president and ceo of the Economic Development Commission of Mid-Florida. Even the marquee of Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando sports a help-wanted sign--for a hall monitor.

In truth, the growth is just getting started. Employment at Universal Studios will swell from 5,600 to 20,000 by 2001 as the company adds everything from superhero theme-park attractions to a 16-screen theater complex and dance clubs, hotels and restaurants. Disney is building six new attractions, including a cruise line and Disney's Animal Kingdom, and 8,000 jobs to run them. Many of those slots have a future: Al Weiss, the president of Disney's Florida Park complex, started as a part-timer who closed out cash registers at the Magic Kingdom.

And what does it all add up to? When asked to advise youngsters about preparing for jobs, the experts are remarkably consistent. Rule 1, says labor consultant Malcom Cohen, is become computer literate. And right alongside it, he says, is learn to communicate well through writing and speaking. Notes Audrey Freedman, an economist who specializes in labor issues: "Students should take the toughest courses they can to develop their logic and reasoning capacity." Essential too, she concurs, is expressing oneself "clearly and persuasively." Above all, in a job world where change is the only constant, the most valuable skill for the young--and their elders--is the ability to keep on learning. (For more on training, see following story.)

For now, experts say, the hot job spots should remain hot for at least the rest of the decade, or for as long as the economy continues to steam along without a sharp recession. "The technology revolution is engulfing the globe," says Sinai. But pockets of low employment, and the gap between educational haves and have-nots, will also endure in the U.S. and always threaten to widen. That will remain a cause for concern even as the upsurge in jobs remains a cause for celebration.

--Reported by Sam Allis/Boston, Marc Hequet/St. Paul, David S. Jackson/San Francisco, Stacy Perman/Orlando and Richard Woodbury/Phoenix, with other bureaus

With reporting by SAM ALLIS/BOSTON, MARC HEQUET/ST. PAUL, DAVID S. JACKSON/SAN FRANCISCO, STACY PERMAN/ORLANDO AND RICHARD WOODBURY/PHOENIX, WITH OTHER BUREAUS