Another piece of advice if you are looking in the US market... try to specialize in an area with more customer interaction. Reason being: low level coding jobs are moving (and will continue to move) off-shore. Jobs that remain in the US will be the ones requiring close interaction with customers (since most customers are here). For example areas like Business Intelligence (Microstrategy, Business Objects, Data Warehousing, Data Mining tools) and Systems Integration (TIBCO, Informatica, Web Methods etc.) are a good choice.

I think computing (software) is still the fastest growing profession (according to my last visit to the bls website). You can't compare the current situation with the late 90's, but compared with other professions it's probably among the top.

Ofcourse, now there are a lot of people in the field. The key thing about getting started on the right foot in IT is specializing in a particular technology area. Select a product or a set of tools in an area that is in good demand. Practice on that and definitely try to get some industry certification on it. In the mean time, do keep looking for job openings. Laxlad's idea of contacting an IT consulting firm is definitely good. Let us know how you fare...

Try to joing the consulting group and they should also help you decide where the money is. Not that there is anything wrong in trying to get some experience, but nowadays a lot jobs teach you and pay you less cuz they r cutting costs. so u wud be able to get any job that would pay something.

Hope this helps.

Imran