Meet the fresh young face of career management in the New Economy.

It values hands-on experience far more than education and, in fact, may have more informal than formal education. It builds its track record not from jobs, but from projects -- often personal projects undertaken apart from any regular job duties. It doesn't do much networking in the old-economy sense of lunches, conferences and professional groups, but it nevertheless accumulates hundreds of valuable contacts around the globe. It isn't much concerned with advancing into management -- at least not yet -- and it changes jobs like most people change underwear.

How is all this possible? It's the New Economy, baby. And while this pattern still doesn't apply to many jobs in many industries, it's a growing trend, especially in the high-tech sector.

And despite the miserable slump that encases much of high tech, many of these young pups are still living large. That's largely due to the split personality of high tech these days. Stock-market prices have plunged and companies have laid off thousands of workers, but many technology sectors are still having trouble finding qualified candidates to fill vacant jobs.

Dan Sanderson dropped out of the University of Washington in 2000 to take a job as a software engineer for the Walt Disney Co.'s star-crossed Internet unit. He landed that job -- complete with signing bonus and stock options -- at a high-tech job fair, despite lacking a degree and much formal work experience. And he was a philosophy major to boot.

His timing couldn't have been worse. The job lasted less than a year, with young Mr. Sanderson accepting a buyout as Disney started shutting down many Internet initiatives. With the economy sagging, you'd think Mr. Sanderson now would be in dire straits, unable to find gainful employment. Perhaps he's considering a return to school to gain important credentials and wait out the storm.

He nixed that idea. "In this industry, experience counts 100 times more than education," he says. So he went looking for another job, and aided by a reference from his fiancée, quickly landed one with Amazon.com Inc., where she works. He started in July, at a higher salary.

Mr. Sanderson's experience over the past year is instructive. This is no starry-eyed dot-commer, managing his career as if on a holy crusade to change the world. Even when the market was hot, he was skeptical about the future of Internet start-ups. That skepticism was enhanced during his college days, when he reluctantly agreed to help one of his philosophy professors create a Web business that never got off the ground. That's why he focused his job search on big companies like Disney. "I wanted a stable company, where I'd be sure of getting my paychecks," he says.

And that's why now, in the midst of an economic downturn, his career philosophy is to "run uphill." As he describes it: "As the floods come in and the dot-coms go under, you go up to the next hill" -- presumably, to a larger, more stable company.

Almost from the beginning, his time at Disney was harrowing, with questions always lurking about the viability of the company's big Internet play, Go.com. Disney's stock price was falling, but Mr. Sanderson says the investing public was expected to come around once the company rolled out redesign projects in the works. "It never happened," he says, referring to public acceptance.

When Disney shut down Go.com in January and laid off 400 people, Mr. Sanderson admits he was nervous. In February, there were more layoffs. "We all knew we were on thin ice," he says.

He recalls having a panic attack when he showed up at work one day and all the desks were empty. Knowing that if he'd been axed he'd be locked out of his computer, he frantically tried to log on -- and did. His colleagues, it turned out, were in a meeting in another room.

Of course, like many 23-year-olds, Mr. Sanderson considers all work as merely temporary. "Because of the temporary nature of the industry, I didn't think of any job as a career," he says. "There are very few vertical promotions at a company for a software engineer. You get your promotions by changing companies." In one e-mail, he says, management pointedly noted that the average job stay was one year. "It felt like you weren't expected to stay," he says.

Thus he and his boss didn't look very far ahead when they discussed his career development, and they never talked about possible promotions or a set career path. "Mostly we talked about skills development," he says. "That's what counts most."

Mr. Sanderson has been avoiding anything that smacks of management anyway. He'd love to be a lead Web developer, but fears the administrative duties would leave little time for programming. But down the road, he says, that's an option. "Companies are always looking for managers who know the technology," he explains.

For now, he's adding to experience through personal projects. How does he explain his job-hunting success in the midst of an economic slump? Mr. Sanderson credits his personal-programming projects, an informal self-education that technology companies prize. These include his Web log, or blog, and a software program he designed to help Web loggers find each other, among other things. The Web log -- his personal discussion, industry and education page combined -- has been an inadvertent but potent career-development tool.

The blogger community online has grown to more than 350,000 people since programs such as Blogger, which make it easy to update Web pages, surfaced two years ago. And while a big chunk of that verbiage is fairly juvenile, Dear-Diary stuff, another big chunk consists of Web-savvy professionals who use their logs as networking and educational tools.

And it's a tight, fiercely loyal community. After leaving Disney, for example, Mr. Sanderson, who lives in Seattle, decided to take a whirlwind tour of the country to meet other bloggers. In several cities, impromptu get-togethers formed to meet and greet the visiting blogger, someone they knew only through his online jottings. "People who know me through the Web log are more interested in me personally and more likely to see me as a good job candidate," he says.

This form of networking is viral, as the Web denizens say, since most Web logs contain links to other bloggers they've read and enjoyed. That's how I got to the logs of the people mentioned here.

Among the contacts Mr. Sanderson has made through his blogging is Dave Winert, president of Userland Software in Burlingame, Calif., which makes Web software. Mr. Winert writes a column on industry issues that appears on his company's Web site and, the site notes, is distributed via e-mail to "leading technologists and business leaders."

Through the Web log of high-tech pioneer Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the Visi-Calc spreadsheet, you can link to Web pages for Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor and Steve Wozniak, as well as Web icons of more recent vintage.

These sites also provide an informal educational service, through essays on industry issues (bloggers love to expound on the state of the industry) and links to Web sites, articles, books and other resources. Mr. Bricklin's site is rich in industry essays and resource links. (For example, Good Documents.com, where you can learn to create business documents in the linked, online environment. Mr. Bricklin wrote most of the site, he notes.) Likewise, Jeffrey Zeldman, a San Francisco Web developer and author, offers links to Web-design resources, discussions on technology and business tutorials.

Simply doing a Web log is an act of learning. Jason Kottke, another San Francisco Web developer, notes that his log is "something I do to keep my writing, design and critical skills in working order."

Mr. Sanderson recognizes that so far in his young career, he's been fortunate. Not all young techies are thriving. Several of his friends have lost jobs and are making do as bank tellers or waitresses. He believes his passion for the business, as expressed through his personal projects, and the added edge in experience those projects give him, have made the difference. Matt Haughey, who helped develop Blogger, has an online resume that doesn't talk about job titles, promotions or responsibilities. Instead, it consists primarily of links to his "personal projects" -- Internet sites the San Francisco Web developer worked on.

"We nerds grew up with computers, it's a way of life," Mr. Sanderson says. "That kind of self-instruction is what companies are looking for."