The improved job market has many companies increasing their recruiting efforts this year, said Lara Stickney, senior manager of Alumni Career Services for the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. The bright outlook is good news for those attending the 23rd Annual Alumni Career Conference, to be held April 12 at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta.

The Career Conference provides an opportunity for alumni and company recruiters to meet face-to-face. More than 100 companies were represented at the 2005 conference, and about 1,000 alumni attended. Companies returning for this year's conference include Internet Security Systems, Prime Engineering and Printpack.

Alumni can register for the event at http://gtalumni.org/careerconference.The deadline for registration is 5 p.m. April 7.

Companies interested in registering can visit http://gtalumni.org/site/Page/Employer for more information.

An 8 a.m. breakfast address, "Where Are the Jobs? Job Search Strategies in the 21st Century," will feature Rosita Smith, business development manager for the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, who will highlight some of the region's growing industries. The breakfast cost is $10.

Joe Evans, IM 71, chairman and CEO of Flag Financial Corp., will present a 12:30 p.m. luncheon address, "Taking Your Career from Good to Great." He will focus on business strategies used by major companies and how job seekers can apply those same strategies to their own career-planning efforts. Tickets for the box lunch are $10.

From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., alumni will meet with company representatives. Informal, on-site interviews with the representatives will be from 2 to 5 p.m.

Alumni should "do their homework," Stickney said. "Research and understand the company's products, operations and services. Prepare specific questions about the company, something to help you engage in conversation with the employers." Registered companies are listed on the Association's Web site, www.gtalumni.org.

"Our society is living on an air mattress that the air is slowly going out of. One day if we don't do something we're going to wake up and find our head on a really hard, cold cement floor," said Thomas L. Friedman, author of the best-selling book "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century."

Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times who came to Georgia Tech as a College of Management IMPACT series speaker, said while working on a documentary on outsourcing in India he was approached by people offering to do his taxes, write software, read X-rays and even track his lost luggage — all from Bangalore. Then the CEO of Infosys Technologies Limited in India told him, "The global economic playing field is being leveled and you Americans aren't ready."

He said he wrote "The World is Flat" so at least his two daughters would understand how the world they're growing up in differs from that of his childhood in the 1950s, when his parents would tell him, "Tom, finish your dinner, people in India and China are starving."

Now he tells his daughters, "Finish your homework because people in India and China are starving for your jobs and in a flat world, oh they can have them because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. It's just a job and it's going to go to the most efficient, smartest, most effective person who can do that job."

Friedman said globalization is now all about individuals globalizing themselves.

"What's really cool and exciting and frightening about this era is that it's built around individuals — individuals competing globally against individuals."