Facebook Inc. recently celebrated the opening of a new office in downtown Austin. The company has already hired more than 60 workers here and is still looking for new employees. Facebook plans to hire at least 200 people during the next four years, with salaries ranging from $50,000 per year for staff workers to $85,000 for managers.

“We’re very excited about the future and our prospects for growth here,” Grady Burnett , director of global sales and operations for Facebook, told the Austin American-Statesman.

Facebook may ask to take a look at your Texas records before they hire you. The company offers its employees many perks, including: a 401k plan; medical and dental benefits; catered breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day; dry-cleaning and laundry services; and reimbursement for public transportation use.

Facebook’s new office in Austin is the company’s first expansion of its online sales and operations teams outside of its California headquarters. The office will serve as the main point of communication between Facebook and everyone the company interacts with, including advertisers, users, and other companies.

If the company reaches its job-creation goals, Facebook will receive a $200,000 tax break over 10 years from the City of Austin and $1.4 million from the State of Texas.

The University of Texas College of Natural Sciences is planning to offer a Health IT Summer Certificate Program. The intensive full-time, nine-week internship program will help about 50 students gain the skills they need to get a health information technology job, with the help of the University of Texas and the Texas e-Health Alliance.

Students who complete the program will receive a certificate as a health information manager and exchange specialist. They will then be eligible for jobs with local HIT companies, such as e-MDs, a company that manages electronic medical records and electronic health records systems, billing, and consultation.

“The job prospects for UT grads aren’t very good right now, despite the fact that it is a tremendous school,” Michael Stearns, president and CEO of e-MDs, told the Austin Business Journal. “One of the biggest challenges facing this (industry) is workforce development.”

The program is being funded by a $5.4 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant awarded to the PURE-HIT Consortium, which includes UT Austin and the University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston.

According to the American Medical Association, the health information technology industry will create about 70,000 jobs during the near future. In addition, the current administration is investing $19 billion to encourage the healthcare industry to create electronic health records.

And the HITECH Act, or Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health, will offer up to $44,000 in Medicare bonus incentives to physicians to demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health records by 2011. Those incentives decrease after 2012.

“We have almost 4,000 biology majors, and those who aren’t going to professional schools have difficulty stepping into jobs,” Leanne Field, faculty adviser and lecturer at UT College of Natural Sciences, said. “On the health IT front, they have lots of jobs, but you have to have training to get into those jobs.

“We know this would be a drop in the bucket of what is needed, but we hope to expand this pilot program going forward so we can offer it via executive education, and not just to UT students,” she continued, adding that 180 students applied for the 50 available spots this year, and that the university plans to seek additional funding in the near future.

The Austin Community College District recently announced that it will create an additional 100 full-time staff positions in order to keep up with increasing enrollment. It is expected there will be openings in all fields, with positions ranging from cashiers to campus police to media technology specialists.

“This new hiring reflects ACC’s commitment to expanding our faculty and staff base as enrollment increases,” Dr. Stephen B. Kinslow, president and CEO of the Austin Community College District, told the Austin Business Journal. “We want to ensure all students have access to the same high-quality education and support services as ACC grows.”

In addition to the new hires, ACC also is planning to open its new Round Rock campus next fall. That campus will eventually measure about 600,000 square feet and serve about 11,500 students.

The hiring and expansion at ACC is a welcome contrast to the layoffs taking place at the University of Texas at Austin. That school has cut jobs across all departments in an effort to control costs and total eliminations are expected to reach 350 positions by the end of the year.

The new jobs will add to the Austin area’s thriving education industry, which has continued to see an increase in monthly and yearly employment, despite the current economic recession.

The Austin-Round Rock area’s education and health services industry employed 85,600 workers during October, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is up from 84,700 workers during September and a 4 percent increase from last year.

Throughout Texas as a whole, the education and health services industry employed 1,372,800 workers during October, up from 1,357,900 workers during September and a 4.5 percent increase from last year.