(Source: Stanford University)Remember the dot-com boom? Of course you do. You probably also remember the bust.



Well, intrepid MBA grads are beginning to return to the scene of the crime, namely California's Silicon Valley. Jobs are resurfacing, and evidently new grads are confident in a rebound.

Consider this from News.com:

While hard data is hard to come by, MBA candidates who have been touring the Valley in recent weeks say job prospects are better now than they have been since the Valley ran into trouble with the end of the dot-com era.

"Everyone out here seems to be hiring to some degree," said Arun Prakash, an MBA candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was among a group of college students that toured roughly 40 companies, including Intel, Yahoo and Cisco Systems, as part of MIT's annual "Tech Trek" to Silicon Valley. The students paid their own way for the five-day trip, and they were hardly the only job Hunters in the area. MBA candidates from Harvard Business School and the Wharton School [of the University of Pennsylvania], among others, were also in town. [....]

Much of what California state statisticians consider Silicon Valley falls within an area that covers the cities of San Jose, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara. California's Employment Development Department reported that the area saw 34,300 full- and part-time jobs filled in November 2005 at companies that fall within what the department considers the "Information" category. This includes Web search engines, telecommunications, software publishers and data processing companies. That marked a 2.4 percent increase from the 33,500 positions filled in November 2004.

"We've seen job growth in this area the past two years," said Ruth Kavanagh, a labor market consultant for the state, adding that the upturn follows three consecutive years of declines.

Baby steps, to be sure, but steps in the right direction for techie MBAs.