Job Prospects Promising for ’97 Graduates

The economic future looks bright for the estimated 4,000 students graduating from the San Fernando Valley’s high schools and junior colleges.

“It’s a great time to be graduating,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist with the Los Angeles Economic Development Agency. “Job prospects are the best they’ve been since the late 1980s.”

The Valley has largely overcome the devastating effects of the recession, defense downsizing and the 1994 Northridge earthquake that left thousands jobless in recent years, and work is slowly filtering back into the area.

“There’s a certain nirvana economy,” said Kyser. “People are looking ahead and seeing low inflation, low unemployment; and the region is gaining momentum.”

Now many businesses from the East Valley entertainment studios to the merging cluster of high-tech companies in the West Valley are scrambling to snatch up the best and the brightest from the class of ‘97, creating an estimated 85,000 new jobs in Los Angeles County this year, Kyser said.

The four studio giants in the Valley--NBC, Warner Bros., Disney and Universal--hired 14,000 workers in 1996 and are expected to hire another 26,000 this year, said Kyser.

Nevertheless, today’s graduates should not count on the same job security that their parents knew. The slow climb up the corporate ladder from mail room to board room just isn’t a viable option for many of them these days, business executives say. Instead, many of them should expect to change jobs every several years in a musical-chairs economy, they warn.

As corporations merge and manufacturing automates, new employment has increasingly come from unconventional sources, said John Rooney, president of the Valley Economic Development Center Inc.

“Ninety-five percent of the new jobs are in small business,” said Rooney, adding that his center helped more than 10,000 small businesses--those with fewer than 500 employees--get started in the past two years in fields from “pizza to aerospace.”

Recent grads are a hot commodity in the job market for three major reasons: They are young (read: energetic), flexible (read: no family commitments), and they accept lower salaries.

At the three junior colleges that celebrated commencement ceremonies in the Valley on Thursday, more than 2,400 students prepared to leave academia to launch professional careers in a region that welcomes them with open arms.

At Valley College, which graduated 834, more than 63 companies showed up to recruit at a job fair in April, ranging from Amgen of Thousand Oaks, the world’s largest biotechnology company, to United Parcel Services.

“We ended up having to put out more tables,” said Shannon Stack, Valley College spokeswoman. “It was the healthiest event we’ve had in eight years . . . The pickup in California was really obvious this year.”

Increasingly, students are hitching their career choices to the region’s burgeoning high-tech industry and many graduates will go on to become systems analysts and computer repairmen, Stack said.

At Mission and Pierce colleges, where a total of 1,576 students donned caps and gowns, technical courses were also a top course pick.

“Our electronics and computer science students are getting jobs even before they leave the program,” said Carmelita Thomas, vice president of academic affairs. “Of course, we encourage them to stay and graduate.”