Careers reconsidered

When Joe Gardner was laid off less than three weeks after Sept. 11, it was the second time in two years that he'd been handed a pink slip.

The first time, he got a large severance package from the drinking-water company where he'd worked for 19 years, starting as a truck driver and moving up through the firm to a job as sales supervisor.

Aware of the difficulties faced by an older man in the job market, he thought about using part of his severance money to get some further education, or to train for a new career. He didn't do it.

Instead, he took a similar job, working for a food broker in Orlando, Fla., getting a specialty brand of drinking water onto supermarket shelves. Then came the economic aftershocks of the terrorist attacks, and Mr. Gardner found himself out of work once again - but this time with no large severance package to soften the blow. "It was kind of like a wake-up call," he says. "I thought, OK, I have to make some changes."

So when Gardner heard about Florida's Operation Paycheck - a first-in-the-nation program designed to retrain workers laid off post-9/11 for new careers - he jumped at the opportunity.

Under a state-sponsored program that identified industries in need of workers, Gardner finally went back to school last week to pursue a longtime love of computers. In 25 more weeks, with tuition costs paid by the state, he will be ready to hunt for a job in a new field, as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. "This filled a need in my life," he says. "This is my opportunity. I am very excited."

Across the country - following a hectic decade of growth that ended last year with more than 2.5 million job cuts from mass layoffs (up 36 percent from 2000) - Americans are looking for new work opportunities in a rapidly changing economy.

While some deal with unemployment with relative ease, finding similar jobs with different employers, thousands of other laid-off workers are seeking out retraining opportunities.

And still other workers, who have not even lost their jobs, are contemplating ways to switch careers or are seeking new skills to help them keep jobs they have.

Exact numbers are hard to come by, given the variety of programs available and the fact that they are administered at state and local levels, but even before the recent downturn, retraining and continuing education were big business in the US.

According to the National Center for Education, some 60 to 70 million Americans - nearly half of the national workforce of 145 million people - were involved in some form of adult education or continuing education in 2000. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about $1 trillion a year is spent on retraining and continuing education in the US.

"It's a different mentality than [in] the late '70s," says Miche Grant, vice-president of the Center of Workforce Innovations in northwest Indiana, which works with many displaced steel workers. "Back then, folks were assuming that once they entered an occupation, whether it was blue collar, or a teacher or a doctor, that they'd be in that occupation for life.

"What we're finding now," she says, "is that you can't depend on a particular job for your whole life. People are beginning to say, 'What are my skills, what are my interests, what am I good at, and how does that apply to a variety of industries?' "

Interviews with workforce experts across the country indicate that the rise of the information age has played a role in shaping how retraining is approached in a "new economy" era.

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