To seize your opportunities and navigate a career in this new borderless world, you have to be prepared to pick up stakes. Depending upon where Mom and Dad live, you might need to move to get that critical first job.

Put some serious thought into where you go when you do go. The place you choose to start your career is key to your economic future. Jobs no longer last forever. In fact, the average twenty-something switches jobs every year. Places can provide the vibrant, thick labor market that can get you that next job and the one after that and be your hedge against layoffs during this economic downturn.

Early career moves are the most important of all, according to my Atlantic colleague Don Peck.Writing in the National Journal, he cited a prominent study that finds that “about two-thirds of all lifetime income growth occurs in the first 10 years of a career, when people can switch jobs easily, bidding up their earnings.” Sure you can move from place to place every time you switch employers (and in fact people in their twenties are three- to four-times more likely to move than people in their fifties) but it’s a lot easier to manage a forward-looking career if you choose the best place right out of the gate.

So where to go?

To help you choose, my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander and I ranked 223 U.S. metropolitan areas according to factors that indicated how active and high-quality their job markets are. We added variables for the share of young adults and college graduates, to capture places that are open to smart twenty-somethings, where you can not only build friendships and look for mates but create the personal professional networks which are so crucial to both careers and happiness. We included a variable for rental housing, since you’ll need to be flexible at first and mortgages are hard to get. After much back and forth, we decided not to include an affordability variable, because we thought the key was to get that critical first job and launch your career—even if you have to double or triple up with roommates. The seven variables we based our rankings on are:

1.      Unemployment rate

2.      Share of the workforce in professional, technical, management or creative positions

3.      Earnings potential (median earnings of BA holders)

4.      The share of young people (ages 25-34) in the population

5.      Share of the population with a BA or above

6.      Mating opportunities (share of population that has never been married)

7.      Rental housing

In years past, ours and other rankings have taken amenities like nightlife and parks into account. Given the truly frightening state of the economy, we decided to focus this year’s rankings mainly on the job market and economic conditions.. We pulled the data from the latest edition of the American Community Survey.

Greater Washington DC comes in first this time around, with a job market that includes everything from government and Fortune 500 companies, to think tanks, start-ups, and NGOs.  It’s a great place for smart, civically minded new grads who might want to test out a wide variety of career options. Greater New York only comes in fifth, which might sound surprising since it’s such a mecca for grads in a wide variety of careers from banking and management to media and entertainment and creative fields from digital media to indie music. But most of them end up living in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or near-by Hoboken and our stats cover the whole metro. Seventh-ranking San Jose is in the heart of Silicon Valley—the place for techies (though Austin, San Francisco, Boston, and Durham-Raleigh’s Research triangle have lots of tech jobs too). Smaller college towns like Madison, Boulder, Iowa City to name a few – also do well. College towns like these have highly-skilled, resilient economies that have been among the best at weathering the economic crisis. They are great hold-over place for grads thinking about their next move, whether it’s the job market or onto grad school.  Our slide show features twenty five metros in all—and there are a lot more college towns and tech capitals in the mix.

Happy hunting—and have some fun while you’re doing it. Finding a job with a future is a real challenge in this economy, but any adventure worth going on has its hardships, and few quests are as exciting (or rewarding) as the pursuit of the right job—and the best place to live. Good luck.

In the Americas broadly (the U.S., Canada and Mexico) 52 percent of the workforce is employed full time by a single employer, 10 percent are unemployed, and 24 percent are underemployed. In Europe, 56 percent are employed full time, nine percent are unemployed, and 20 percent are underemployed. Workers have the most precarious situation in Africa, where only 19 percent are employed full time for an employer. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the countries that comprised the former Soviet Union have the highest percentage of their workers working full time for an employer.

Gallup’s analysis finds a close association between economic development (measured as GDP per capita) and full time work, a negative relationship between economic development and underemployment, but no relationship between economic development and the rate of unemployment.

Unemployment remains a persistent problem in the U.S. and other advanced nations, but perhaps a closer consideration of full time work and underemployment will yield another, even more useful set of insights.

While the business press points to May’s slowdown in the pace of layoffs as an early sign of recovery, Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel says not so fast. Frankel, who’s also a member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, prefers an alternative indicator of employment – total hours worked – which he says provides a better gauge of economic cycles (pointer from Economix).

Speaking entirely for myself, I like to look at the rate of change of total hours worked in the economy. Total hours worked is equal to the total number of workers employed multiplied by the average length of the workweek for the average worker. The length of the workweek tends to respond at turning points faster than does the number of jobs.

Frankel provides the graph below which tracks the trend in hours worked over the past decade.

The location decisions of graduating college students has interested me for years. The reason is simple: College grads are making a joint decision about what job to take, what labor market to enter, and what city to live in, so they provide an interesting lens into how these choices get made. And, because they are both highly skilled and highly mobile – three to five times lore likely to move than, say, a 45-year-old – the locations they pick are likely to leave a lasting imprint on our economic geography.

For the past several years, the Harvard Crimson has surveyed the graduating class. I’m the first to admit it’s a highly biased sample, but it’s also a very interesting one – tracking graduates from arguably the world’s leading university. As such, it provides useful signals about the kinds of jobs and the kinds of places highly motivated, highly mobile young talent is picking.

The results of earlier surveys were predictable. Harvard grads traditionally headed to consulting and investment banking jobs in NYC. But this year’s findings – coming as they are in the midst of the economic and financial crisis – evidence some different and interesting trends.

Still Getting Jobs: While stories about the worsening job prospects for college grads are legion, the economic and financial crises have not significantly altered prospects for Harvard grads. The survey found that 59 percent of students had jobs lined up prior to graduation down slightly from 66 percent last year. This is understandable since Harvard grads are headed into professional, knowledge, and creative occupations which have the lowest rates of unemployment and since they signal top talent.

That said, career choices are certainly shifting along some predictable and some not-so-predictable lines.

Finance and Consulting Fade: Far fewer grads are headed to finance and consulting. The figure has been consistently down over the past three years, actually – falling from 47 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2008 to 20 percent this year. The numbers of grads headed into finance fell from  23 percent last year to 11.5 percent this year, while consulting dropped from 16 percent to 8.5 percent.

Education and Health Care Gain: More grads are headed to education and health care. Education is up from 10 to 15 percent of grads. Health care increased from six to 12 percent.

Government Down, Slightly: Despite the conventional view that government work might become more attractive, the share of grads taking jobs in government fell slightly this year 4.5 to three percent. The Crimson suggests this is “a paradoxical trend given the Democratic victories in the 2008 elections and the fact that 74 percent of Harvard seniors describe themselves as more liberal or considerably more liberal than the average American.”

I think it’s more predictable. Having taught public policy students for the better part of three decades, I’ve seen a long-running trend away from traditional government work which is perceived as overly hierarchical and bureaucratic. Public service and cause-oriented students I’ve come across prefer work in smaller scale, more flexible non-profits where they believe they can have more immediate impact. The Crimson reports that “programs like Teach for America… received applications from a record-setting 14 percent of Harvard seniors, according to data released by the organization.”

What They Really Want to Do: I found this question to be the most interesting in the survey. When grads were asked “what career they would choose if finances were not a concern,” the number one field was the arts, with 16 percent choosing it as their “dream field,” followed by public service (12.5 percent) and education (12 percent). Finance and consulting dropped to five percent each.

Top Cities: Check out the great map below. The greater Boston area is the top destination – reinforcing the point that having an elite university (or more) in your local backyard can be a considerable talent advantage. And since after-college moves are the pinnacle of mobility it can be a lasting one. Cities might do better by focusing a little bit less on luring “ex-pats” back home, and a little more on retaining the college grads that have already chosen them.  New York has fallen from its previous top spot. D.C. is down just a tad – even with the new heavily Harvard Obama administration and the southern shift in the nation’s financial and economic nerve center. Small percentages are headed to the South or the Midwest, with Chicago drawing just 1.3 percent of grads. Seventeen percent of grads are going abroad – which may be taken as a signal of a shrinking U.S. and improving foreign opportunities but which I view as a very positive sign for the future.