UNDERWOOD - Like a mom at suppertime, North Dakota calls her children home.

That message to every kid who graduated and packed his bags for opportunity is being heard around the country.

Those kids are growing up, they've got valuable job experience and they want for their kids what they had - ties that bind and simplicity.

There are jobs on the table and they are coming home.

Their reappearance with spouse and children tucked in the moving van beside them means North Dakota is finally picking ripe fruit from its own shelter belt, planted with seeds of economic development, jobs creation and financing, good business climate and utilization of natural resources.

Their mothers - the grandmothers of those little ones - are overjoyed to see them.

So are the communities where they're settling and so especially are the employers who are hiring them.

Over the past 20 years, the state has invested many millions in economic development and financing and proposes to spend $12 million for the next two years alone.

There have been stumbles and starts, loud fanfare and quiet failure and a gradual understanding that development would best come by building from the inside out, not the outside in.

All those efforts are coming together, and there are more and many better paying jobs available in North Dakota and in this region than there have ever been. The surge is helped in no small part by a lucky Jack-and-the-Beanstalk seed in the oil patch and by baby boomers who are retiring out of some of the state's best-paying jobs in coal mines and power plants.

Dan Schumacher, business service consultant for Job Service North Dakota, says the strength of North Dakota's economy is being noticed around the country.

Getting a double-take for muscularity is better than being noticed for good looks when the economic strength sags elsewhere.

Schumacher said the region's retail growth, the Northern Plains Commerce Centre - a manufacturing and transmodal shipping project in Bismarck that's aligned with Bobcat Melroe - computer-based centers for customer service and information processing, two ethanol plants, major industrial retrofits at several power plants, and wind energy development add up to an exciting time.

More jobs than ever are being listed through Job Service - more than double the number of jobs posted eight years ago,

Job Service posted 60,000 job openings in the year ending July. There are 10,000 jobs posted statewide this week and 1,600 of them are in Bismarck-Mandan alone. This does not count the many private sector job listing in the state's newspapers.

Wages are better, too.

Job Service analyst Michael Ziesch said just the past three years have shown a marked increase in wages of jobs on the market. That reflects pressure on the labor pool and the quality of jobs themselves.

Today, 33 percent of employers who put a wage on their job order are offering between $10 and $20 an hour. Three years ago, just 24 percent of employers offered that much, Ziesch said.

Jobs posted at more than $20 per hour make up 6 percent of jobs posted, compared to 2 percent three years ago.

Around 1.5 percent of jobs are for minimum wage, and those jobs go longest without being filled.

"Our economic activity and job opportunity is probably at the highest level that I can recall," said Schumacher. He's been with the agency for more than two decades.

As jobs increase, so do contacts from people who live out of state.

Each 90-day posting period attracts 200 job seekers registered from out of state, and not just neighboring Montana and South Dakota.

Schumacher says those job seekers are from 32 to 38 states, and a majority have some connection to North Dakota, either through birth, marriage or military service.

Others are attracted to the combination of employment and lower cost of living.

Shane Goettle is commissioner of the state Commerce Department.

The department was created four years ago to merge three former state agencies, Community Services, Economic Development & Finance and Tourism, plus a new Workforce Development Division within the Department of Commerce.

For a long time, those agency efforts have been focused on creating jobs to keep North Dakota's population from tipping backward.

This task of finding people to fill them is something new.

"We've not had this kind of challenge before," Goettle said. Part of the department's focus is working with trades and colleges to get a handle on how young people can prepare themselves though education and training to remain in the state.

Another part is capturing that pent up base of people who want to come back home.

Goettle said the department has developed a program that hooks up employers with expatriated North Dakotans.

It's like mom leaving the doorstep to fetch her children home from one end of the neighborhood to the other.

The department tried out the program two months ago in St. Paul, Minn., and plans another go in Denver this spring.

Goettle said the program -Experience North Dakota - played matchmaker, bringing 30 booths representing private sector employers, including the city of Dickinson peddling 1,000 job openings, to North Dakota alumni living in the St. Paul metro area.

He said he would have been happy had 200 expatriates showed.

More than twice that many did.

Goettle said it was fulfilling to watch young couples, kids in tow, come into the room, to learn, to talk and to leave resumes.

He said there's a long list of work categories that need people, ranging from welders, health workers and electricians, to basic manufacturing.

It was typical for alumni from St. Paul to say their folks were living back here, and they already know North Dakota is a great state, he said.

The call of North Dakota as a place to live is loud and clear. It only needs a job to close the deal.

This is as good a time, and perhaps better time, than any.

"There's the old North Dakota trying to create jobs. The new North Dakota is we're trying to fill jobs," he said.