Maybe you should. But please base your decision on something other than their relative "hotness" at the moment. I mean, Jake Gyllenhaal is pretty hot at the moment, too, but that doesn't make him the boy for me. Same goes for you and these oh-so-fabulous careers that everyone is talking about.

Every time one of those lists of the hottest careers or industries comes out, usually based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I receive a steady stream of questions from readers asking me whether they should pursue one or more of these fields.

Perhaps the most disturbing came from a young man who wanted to know if he should study to be a nurse or an electrical engineer. I told him I didn't know what unnerved me more: the thought of being cared for by a nurse who should have been an electrical engineer or vice versa.

Three-fourths of the companies monitored employees' Web site visits. Almost two-thirds said that monitoring was "ongoing" or "routine."

Just over half said they monitored phone calls. About one in five said they taped calls.

More than half reported using video monitors.

Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

A new survey from Salary.com says most of you don't. It says a majority, 65%, are dissatisfied, not every day and not all the time. But once dissatisfaction hits, it can last years and years and years.

Find the flow. Flow is a term coined by psychologist and author Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. It's that feeling of being so caught up in whatever you're doing that you stop watching the clock. You're not overwhelmed, you're absorbed. You skipped your mid-morning cup of coffee, you haven't bothered to check your E-mail. You even forgot to go to the bathroom. In other words, you're involved. Being involved in something you enjoy doing - where you can use your skills to accomplish a task you feel is meaningful and important - makes for a satisfying work experience.

The Conference Board said its measure of online help-wanted advertising volume fell to 1.63 million last month from 1.82 million in November.

Online job ads declined in all 52 metropolitan areas for which data was available, including New Orleans, which dipped for the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast region in late August, the report said.

"A large portion of the declines in ads in November and December are seasonal declines as businesses cut back recruitment ads during the holiday season," said Ken Goldstein, labor economist at The Conference Board.

Work and career loom large as areas into which you can put your new-found energy. You can change careers relatively easily at this age if you are not happy in your work environment. Your financial and social commitments should not be such that a move might bankrupt you or leave you destitute. The time for a big mortgage that can tie you to your job lies ahead, if at all.

Time to ask some work-related questions. Are you happy at work? Is this the right industry or field for you? Are you working with people you like and respect? Can you see a career path with opportunities to create a bright future? Do you dread going to work every day? Do you feel the need to study and develop your skills? Can you see yourself staying in this field or industry for the next 10 years?

Careers in which you help people, one-on-one, are rewarding, and the work environment is usually pleasant. Audiology is my favorite. Pay and prestige are excellent, and the job market will be strong because as baby boomers age, their hearing fades. And audiologists will be offering ever better hearing aids. The annoying conventional aids are being replaced by more pleasing computer-controlled ones. A final plus is that audiology is an under-the-radar career—few people consider it, so competition isn't as keen as it deserves to be. One downside: Universities' relentless push to keep more students longer is creating pressure to make audiology programs doctoral.

What is the most important factor that will influence executive pay and hiring in the technology industry this coming year? Is it globalization? Data management? Business process improvement? No. None of the above. It's Google. Failure of a company to factor in how Google will influence its own bottom line could well lead to its premature demise, according to a new survey just released by New York City-based headhunting firm Christian & Timbers.

"If your company does not have an eye on Google or globalization, your company won't make it to 2010," Umesh Ramakrishnan, vice chairman of performance-based executive search firm Christian & Timbers, told the E-Commerce Times, "and the executives who understand these dynamic market forces are in high demand."

US employers added 108,000 jobs in December, the government said in a report analysts said suggested a temporary cooling of economic growth.

The Labor Department's report on nonfarm payrolls was well below the 205,000 new jobs expected on average by private economists. But the agency made an upward revision to show a gain of 305,000 jobs in November from a prior estimate of 215,000.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, fell to 4.9 percent.

Analysts said the payroll growth figure was below what is needed to absorb new labor market entrants. But they note that monthly data may be volatile and that the average of November and December figures remains healthy.

Employers expect to hire 14.5 percent more new college graduates in 2005-06 than they hired in 2004-05, according to the Job Outlook 2006 Fall Preview Survey, conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Overall, 66.5 percent of employers responding to the survey reported that they expect to hire more new college graduates in 2005-06 than they hired in 2004-05. Approximately 15 percent indicated that their college hiring will remain even with last year's levels, and about 18 percent said they will cut back on the number of new college graduates they hire in 2005-06.

There's continued demand for people with information security skills, say Symons and others. And even though long-term demand is expected to remain strong, the growing ranks of people who have obtained IT security certifications has had a short-term dampening effect on compensation.

David Foote, principal and chief research officer at Foote Partners LLC in New Canaan, Conn., says there has been strong demand for people with Cisco security skills as well as those with IT auditing certifications. Still, he says, compensation for security skills has tapered off in recent months as many unemployed and underemployed IT workers have obtained security skills to become more marketable. The resulting increase in security specialists has helped to deflate wages, at least in the short term, says Foote.

Dice's Melland says he's starting to see skills shortages in different geographies, including a need for network security experience and government security clearances. To meet its own changing business requirements, NStar is adjusting its skill mix of full-time IT workers and contractors through attrition, new hires and retraining, says Zimon. High on its list are security analysts because NStar is in the final throes of a four-year effort to create a team of security and risk management specialists.

There's a lot of talk about developer jobs being sent overseas, but "most of the stuff that's going offshore is low-level coding jobs," says Craig Symons, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

The majority of the technology adopted by businesses in the future will have its roots in the consumer market, said analyst Gartner which also believes that companies will soon start encouraging employees to purchase their own PCs.

In a research note released last week, Businesses Need to Explore Consumer Technology Before the Next Internet Revolution Leaves Them Behind, the analyst group claims that while traditional enterprise software remains critical, many functions can be accomplished through technologies designed for consumers.

Applications that are making inroads into enterprises include the Google Desktop, AOL IM, and Skype's voice-over-IP software, Gartner said.