1992 career guide. Best jobs for the future. Salary survey

The best news many workers are looking for when annual review time rolls around this year is that they'll have a job for the foreseeable future. A raise? That's surely hoping for too much. Indeed, some 10 percent of the organizations surveyed by the Wyatt Co., a compensation and benefits consulting firm in New York, have frozen wages this year. About 3 percent plan to do the same in 1992. But salaries have clearly been pummeled harder in some industries than in others. The paychecks of people who work in the retail trade and in the building materials and equipment industry, for example, have barely kept pace with inflation this year. Next year promises more of the same. Those in the legal field, by contrast, enjoyed raises of 8 percent in 1991, and nurse-anesthetists averaged 10 percent. Across the board, salaries in 1991 went up 5.5 percent. But businesses are cynical about the economy's prospects, says Wyatt compensation expert Marsha Cameron, and their planned raises for 1992 average only 5.3 percent. To determine where a profession pays best, U.S. News, in conjunction with Wyatt, took a look at what 18 jobs pay on average at the entry, senior professional and middle manager levels in five regions of the country. The salaries come from Wyatt's survey of more than 3,500 organizations across the United States. New graduates in software engineering may want to send their résumés to Texas and Colorado, for example, where starting salaries, at $34,200, average $6,200 more than in Alabama and Georgia.250+