In a converted ballroom in the student center at California State University, Sacramento, this week, dozens of firms set up shop to recruit graduating seniors for well-paying jobs and younger students for summer internships that could lead to full-time employment after they earn their degrees.

Cici Mattiuzzi, who has been running these job fairs for years, said companies began calling her about the event last year. By January, they had taken most of the slots she had available. She changed the room's layout several times to cram a few more employers inside - 130 in all. Then she started a waiting list.

"I'm numb," she told me as she took a short break from the frenzy. "I have no idea how this happened."

The scene looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange after the opening bell. Students clutching résumés gathered around company representatives trying to sell the aspiring engineers on their firms. The din of a thousand separate conversations was not quite deafening, but it was loud.

The companies and government agencies present said they had more than 4,000 job openings. They needed construction managers, computer scientists and civil, mechanical and electrical engineers. Most had jobs with starting salaries above $50,000 a year, some higher.

The firms included a bunch of big names - Intel Corp., Turner Construction, AT&T, Chevron - and many smaller, local companies. The military was there and the utilities. And of course Caltrans, the massive state government transportation agency that by itself is looking to hire 600 engineers in the coming year.

Angela Serra, a Sacramento State alumna who was back in town to help Chevron recruit from her alma mater, said the company hired 25 graduates from the school last year. Serra said the firm has a huge need for information technology workers.

"We have a lot of people ready to retire," she said. "We have to backfill for that."

Indeed, the aging of the baby boom generation is poised to create what might be an unprecedented demand for skilled and professional workers throughout the economy. In the coming years, more middle-income jobs will probably come open through retirements than are created by new and expanding firms.

But in engineering, the baby boom transition is only the beginning.

Public agencies are building new schools, water systems, highways and transit to serve a growing population and catch up after years of underinvestment. All those projects need engineers. And in the private sector, many projects that have been in the planning stages for years are just now coming on line, even with the slowdown in the economy.

The administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger projects that California companies and government agencies will need an additional 40,000 engineers by 2014 to expand and to replace retirees. Schwarzenegger is proposing to expand education and training programs to boost the number of engineers available.

Most of the big companies also offer extensive internships to train engineers while they are still in school and groom them for permanent jobs.

Bob McAndrew, an electrical engineer with PG&E, said the big utility has about 100 slots for interns and still had 20 to fill as of this week.

"We have a lot of projects in the works," McAndrew said. "We always have to upgrade the system."

Mattiuzzi, the director of career services for the CSUS College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, said she loves working with engineers because of the can-do, problem-solving attitude that is common among them.

In other places she has worked, she said, when people said, "We've never done that before," they meant it as an excuse for why they couldn't try something new. But the engineers, she said, use the same expression with excitement in their voices about an opportunity to experiment: "We've never done that before!"

"They are the people who make stuff work," she said. "These are the people who are going to be building our future."

Mattiuzzi said the typical engineering student at the school takes six to eight years to graduate, because many of them are part-time students working to support themselves and pay for school. Many are the children of blue-collar workers or construction workers tired of wielding a nail gun. They are looking for an advanced education so that they can move up in their field.

Higher fees and budget cuts that shrink class offerings won't help.

As the state government weathers the latest slowdown in tax revenue, legislators and the governor need to ensure that the places now educating our next generation of bridge builders and software writers are given the tools they need to do the job. Otherwise, in a few years, we might not be able to do ours.