New York ? Mike Zimmerman has left college to start a Web design business with some friends in Philadelphia. He’s concerned, though, that the very technology he intends to make a living from also means someone else, far away, can do the same job.

“As far as this stuff is concerned it can be done from anywhere,” he said. “You really can’t stop it. People are going to go where the cheapest prices are and the best quality of work.”

With all the talk of white-collar jobs moving overseas, it’s no wonder that Americans, particularly those just entering the work force, are wondering about the safety of their jobs and reassessing career and educational choices.

Career coach Michael T. Robinson of Careerplanner.com believes the best jobs for the future are the ones that require a worker’s physical presence and can’t easily be done remotely, like nursing, real estate and teaching. Another route is to go for jobs that require a lot of skill, like music, acting, or writing — these aren’t likely to move overseas either.

Others, like John Challenger, CEO of job placement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas in Chicago, dismiss the idea that the offshoring phenomenon is worth the attention of those trying to pick a career.

“There may be some people mistakenly trying to figure out ‘where are the jobs that can’t be moved overseas?'” Challenger said, “but then they run into the fact that those jobs are also subject to job loss. Our environment today no longer offers lifetime employment.”

Service sector a hot one

Government projections do show that some of the fastest-growing areas of the job market for the next eight years are ones that are hard to send overseas: health care, education, bars and restaurants and government.

However, this continues a long-running trend. Service jobs have been growing the fastest because outsourcing of manufacturing jobs started decades ago. The more recent phenomenon of computer programming work and call centers moving to India and the Philippines is not expected to have a major impact for the next decade.

Analysts at Forrester Research Inc. have estimated that 3.4 million jobs will leave the United States by 2015. That figure is dwarfed, however, by the 21.3 million jobs the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the economy to add by 2012.

Challenger sees the current fear of white-collar offshoring as similar to the worry over blue-collar offshoring in the 1980s and the fear in the ’90s that technology would replace jobs.

“And yet the number of jobs in the economy is going to grow,” Challenger said.

Of the new jobs, 20.8 million are expected to be in the service sector, compared to 770,000 in manufacturing.

The hottest job area is expected to be health care, which BLS sees as adding 3.5 million jobs from 2002 to 2012, due to an aging population and an increase in the number of treatable diseases. Doctors, pharmacists, veterinarians, physical therapists and nurses can all look forward to good job markets.

Jobs in education are expected to grow 20 percent by 2012, adding about 2.5 million jobs. The fluid job market is part of the reason — more adults are expected to go back to school and learn new trades and skills. Also, the children of the large baby boom generation will continue to reach college age.

Technology interests fading

A lot of attention has been paid to jobs in computer technology moving overseas, especially to India. However, observers still see huge domestic demand for software engineers and other technology workers.

BLS projections, which attempt to factor in the effect of offshoring, show the job market for people with computer science degrees expanding by about 160,000 per year until 2012. U.S. colleges and universities produce about 55,000 computer science degrees a year.

No wonder, then, that Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates toured campuses this spring, telling students that while companies including his own are recruiting in India, that doesn’t mean there won’t be a huge demand for technology workers in the United States.

At Ohio University, a preliminary count of applications to the engineering and technology school show a “a fairly significant drop,” according to Dennis Irwin, its dean. That’s on top of a similar drop last year.

“The issue of whether those numbers are due to outsourcing or not is certainly a matter of debate among my colleagues,” Irwin said.

Technology can be fickle, however, as many learned when the dot-com bubble burst a few years ago. Specific skills that once guaranteed a good job, like a particular programming language, may be outdated the next year.

Jeremy Valeda, who recently finished his undergraduate degree in computer science at Ohio University, is preparing for the future by broadening his education with a more business-oriented master’s degree.

“I’d love to be in management, and you can’t outsource management per se,” he said.

Ultimately, of course, looking at tables and statistics of future job projections is not a very good way to figure out what to do with one’s life.

“If you can figure out in life what you’re meant to do … which is very hard to do, then we think you’re gonna be successful even in down market,” as career coach Robinson said.