When Shaun Byrnes graduated from college in 2001, he dropped off more than 200 resumes and was rewarded with two job offers.

Despite the fact that Mr. Byrnes had gotten an undergraduate degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most prestigious business programs in the country, neither job offered to him was in his preferred area of financial planning or asset management.

Oh, how times have changed. As Mr. Byrnes, 27, of Squirrel Hill, prepares to graduate this spring with a master's degree in information security policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University, he has multiple offers for government information technology jobs in Washington, D.C., which is exactly what he wants to do and where he wants to be.

As Mr. Byrnes and other college and graduate students can attest, after years of meager offerings, the job market is looking up, fueled by a national economy in its fifth year of expansion and a local economy expected to experience its first significant job growth since the late 1990s.

"We were the first year after the bust. We just didn't have much opportunity" Mr. Byrnes said of his 2001 job hunt. "It does seem like it's a lot easier this time around."

The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports a 14.5 percent jump in the number of new college graduates that companies nationwide expect to hire this year over last year, bringing hiring to its highest levels since 2001.

At the University of Pittsburgh career center last week, students were doing mock job interviews as part of Real World Week and picking up fliers listing careers for liberal arts majors such as classics and philosophy.

Marvin Roth, director of career services at Pitt, said the bottom started to fall out of the job market in 2001. "Each year thereafter," he said, "there's been a gradual increase in employer activity. Each year, we've seen ... improvement over the previous year."

At Carnegie Mellon, the number of companies participating in the school's spring job fair is up 50 percent over last year, to 120 from roughly 80, said Judi Mancuso, associate director of the Carnegie Mellon career center.

Those numbers aren't as good as they were six or seven years ago, but, then again, many of the jobs that were filled back then are no longer around.

"In 1999 and 2000, it was a very unrealistic job market," Ms. Mancuso said. "A lot of those jobs were based on companies that don't even exist anymore."

At one of Carnegie Mellon's fall job fairs this year, senior William Gronim stopped by a booth run by the online selling giant Amazon.com. He quickly answered a few general computer questions from the recruiter, and then some specific questions about Amazon's business before being invited to further interviews.

Last summer, Mr. Gronim was an intern at IBM's hyper-competitive Extreme Blue program for promising students pursuing software development and MBA degrees. He received three job offers from IBM at the end of the summer program, then, in the fall, interviewed for several other jobs, including one on an Army base where he would have had to take a daily two-hour afternoon break to escape deafening artillery tests, and received more job offers.

"I didn't think it would be this easy," he said in an interview last week. Some companies, he said, are now cold-calling him to offer jobs, drawn by his experience with Extreme Blue.

Mr. Gronim, a computer science major originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., eventually chose to move to Seattle for what he calls "a dream job" at Amazon.com.

He'll make about $80,000, not including a signing bonus and company stock. "I was shocked when they offered me stock," he said. "I thought that was a six-years-ago kind of thing."

While Mr. Gronim's experience shows that some companies have clearly returned to the good old days, it's not yet the norm, particularly for students looking locally.

"The job market has clearly picked up in Pittsburgh, there's no question in my mind," said Jim McClenahan, director of the career services center at Duquesne University. "But it still isn't what it should be for all of our students. I wouldn't call this a strong job market."

Even though the seven-county area added 3,300 jobs last year and is forecast to add more than 11,000 this year, it still has a lot of ground to make up. Regional nonfarm employment last year trailed its 2001 peak by 17,000, according to recent estimates from the state Department of Labor and Industry.

Mr. McClenahan said he had seen strong demand regionally in accounting, finance and supply management jobs, but that demand for students with information technology degrees was still somewhat weak.

In other words, for every William Gronim, there's a Michelle Behm, a Pitt senior still looking for a post-graduation IT job.

She's put her resume on such national job search sites as monster.com, but has heard back only from companies that are out of state, or out of country, in India.

"I don't feel like it's gotten that much better," she said. "You still have to know people."

Her friend and fellow Pitt senior, Melissa Ellsworth, hasn't found a job either, though she acknowledges she hasn't done much looking. With a double major in political science and communications, she's not optimistic about her prospects.

"I started with pharmacy," she said. "I should have stuck with pharmacy."

Mr. Roth, at Pitt, notes that even with an improved job market, students still need to get experience through internships and be aggressive about their job searches.

"The fear I have is that students might become complacent," he said. "It's still not a situation where students will find employers falling all over themselves."