Mark Savage is director of Engineering Co-Op and Engineering Career Services. Submissions are invited for Chronicle's regular column of ideas and opinion.

As final exams wrapped up, employers were desperately rushing to notify Engineering Co-op and Career Services of their needs to fill last-minute job requisitions. Much to their disappointment, most engineering graduates already knew where they would be hanging their diplomas this fall.

Such was not the case five years ago, when engineering graduates were stunned and discouraged to discover they were not likely to partake in the legacy of instant and multiple job offers that favored graduates only three years earlier. Indeed, technical graduates of the late-1990s had turned their backs on corporate America to embrace dot-com start-up firms with their promise of high-paying jobs accompanied by a treasure-trove of perks and stock options.

By 2001, that bubble had burst, dismantling dot-com after dot-com while dragging down the previously flourishing electronics and consulting industries. One by one, job offers were rescinded or repeatedly delayed. The high-tech industry, overloaded with warehouses of equipment that had no markets, sent the entire U.S. economy into a tailspin. The tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, further deepened the impact, suppressing all hope for a fast recovery.

In 2002 and 2003, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ushered in the rapid growth of the defense sector, which evolved as one of the only games in town for engineering graduates. While the financial-services sector maintained a slightly reduced presence on campus, the consulting industry virtually disappeared from view during that time, and few other industries were hiring. Between 2001 and 2003, the percentage of Cornell engineering undergraduates who directly entered the workforce after graduation dropped to 35 percent from 55 percent, while those pursuing graduate study rose to 50 percent from 33 percent.

But by spring 2004, the sluggish job market began to improve, and employers returned to campus with stronger needs to recruit technical students in each succeeding year. By 2005, students entering the workforce increased to 51 percent while those pursuing graduate study receded to 38 percent, more closely mirroring trends that prevailed prior to 2001 and the economic downturn.

Today, engineers face a strong and active job market that values analytical and problem-solving skills acquired from a technical curriculum. Some 180 unique employers conducted 4,213 full-time job interviews on campus this year through the Engineering Co-op and Career Services Office in Carpenter Hall; engineering students took many more interviews through Cornell Career Services in Barnes Hall. Even though the number of interviews conducted in 2007 was half those conducted at the peak of the dot-com era, students are raking in job offers with employers from a wide variety of industries, from high-tech, bio-tech, consulting and financial services to manufacturing, government and education.

Average B.S.-level salaries for engineering graduates, which had dropped by 10 percent to $52,503 in 2002 from $56,072 in 2001, grew slowly. By 2006 (the most recent year for which validated data is available), salaries had finally surpassed 2001 levels with starting salaries averaging about $57,000 and $66,000, respectively, for engineering undergraduate and master's degree graduates.

Today, savvy employers are using a variety of ways beyond on-campus interviews to connect with students, including career fairs, student organizations, electronic résumé collections and e-mail broadcasts facilitated by Cornell Career Services, postings on the Cornell Career Services electronic job board (known as CornellTRAK) and expanded use of Internet technologies. Employers have also ramped up their internship programs with the intention to convert strong intern and co-op performers into full-time hires. In 2006, the number of engineering graduates who accepted full-time career positions with their summer or co-op internship employers was nearly as high as for those who obtained their positions through on-campus recruiting.

Because engineering education is all about problem-solving through the use of analytical processes, quantitative applications and technology, many would assume that engineering graduates would gravitate toward careers in research and development, design, applications, programming and testing. Indeed, half of today's engineering graduates take these paths. However, the marketable skills that engineering graduates bring to the workplace are also of strong interest to a broad range of industries and functions not typically associated with engineering, from consulting and financial services to sales and marketing. Nearly 50 percent of Cornell's engineering students embrace these nontraditional career paths.

To be sure, these students are eager to use their technical skills, but they want to practice them in a business applications environment, often found in the financial services or consulting sectors. They are less attracted to the traditional "hard core" engineering roles that defined engineering graduates a generation ago. Thus, it is not surprising to find IBM Business Consulting Services, Goldman-Sachs and Capital One standing alongside Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and General Electric among the top 10 employers of Cornell engineering graduates.