Growing excitement, expectations for green jobs corps

(CNN) — When Rita Bryer sees 300-foot-tall wind turbines sprouting up from the prairie near her home in western Oklahoma, she can’t help but wonder about the view from the top, where blades the size of semi-trucks spin.

“Out here, you can see the wind turbines from 10 miles away,” she said. “Think about how far you’ll be able to see when you’re at the top.” read more

Big Bank Execs: What They Take Home

When times were good, the top executives from the largest U.S. banks made a mint. Below is the total compensation in 2007 for the 9 banks that received the first batch of government aid through TARP. read more

Top Ten Jobs for 2009

In 2009, the job market will be full of contrasts: some industries will be eviscerated while others face shortages of workers. The good news is that despite the recession, there are still real jobs to be had. The bad news is that you may have to change fields to find one.

The trick to job hunting in 2009 will be to figure out how your skill-set can translate across industries, says Elaine Varelas, a managing partner at Boston-based outplacement firm Keystone Partners, so that you’re not confined to searching one sector of the economy. “People are frustrated because it’s taking them a while to assess the job market,” she says. “They’ll have to figure out other things they can do and want to do.” Successful job-seekers will be the ones who can figure out how to take skills learned in one kind of job and translate them into assets in others.

Here are the top eight areas where work can be found in 2009: read more

Alternative Energy Companies Grow Even as Others Falter

Inquiries, Sales and Funding Rise in Anticipation of New Regulations — and Spending — From Obama Administration

While many small businesses continue to struggle with tight credit and declining sales, one fledgling industry is seeing a boom in investment and sales growth: alternative energy. read more

SBA Offering Economic Web Chats

The U.S. Small Business Administration is offering Web chats to help small businesses across the country weather the recession.

Entrepreneurs Feel Squeeze as Venture Capital Gets Scarce

Venture capitalists are reining in spending amid the financial downturn, a shift that has implications for entrepreneurial activity.

According to two sets of data pegged for release Saturday, venture capitalists did fewer new financing of companies and spent less money in the third quarter than they did a year earlier. Venture capitalists typically put money into young companies, with the aim of profiting later when those start-ups go public or are acquired. read more

Start-ups in a down economy

Nobody loves a recession*. But many successful entrepreneurs say that, in retrospect, they were lucky to have launched their businesses in tough times.

Case Study No. 1: How Method Weathered the Dot-com Bust

* A recession is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters during which the country’s gross domestic product shrinks. It is too soon to say whether the economy is in a recession now.

When they look back on the early days of their start-up, Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan remember that a lot of potential investors laughed at them. The Bay Area, where they were living, was awash in Internet start-ups. Each week in 2000 brought another glitzy launch party or news that the scantest of business plans had attracted venture capital. Even office landlords were demanding equity from their dot-com tenants. Lowry and Ryan, who wanted to start a company to make — of all things — humdrum household products, were decidedly out of step with the times. “You had the sense that there was this real historical thing going on in the region, even if it was not going to end well,” says Ryan. read more