Longtime workers go back to school

By Russell Grantham

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

At 41, you wouldn’t think Douglas Hartley would be retooling his career for the third time, but he is. Hartley, video technician-turned-information technology worker-turned college student, is only days away from getting a mechanical engineering degree he hopes will give him a stable career with good pay.

These days, he’s got plenty of company and competition, not only from students barely half his age but from other returning students who are years or even decades older.

Indeed, in the worst recession and financial crisis since the 1930s, many older workers have returned to school after losing their jobs or being battered by shock waves hitting their industries or their retirement savings.

Enrollment in Georgia’s 35 public colleges and universities has surged 16 percent in roughly three years, to more than 300,000, as people have sought to make themselves more marketable in the difficult economy.

At Georgia State University, enrollment of older students has grown more than twice as fast as the overall student population since the recession began. Since the fall term of 2008, the number of students over 50 years old has grown 13.6 percent, compared with 5.7 percent for total enrollment, according to the university.

Meanwhile, applications have jumped about 40 percent in the past 18 months at Experience Works, an Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit that provides federally funded employment retraining for low-income people over 55 years old in 30 states, including Georgia.

Such retooling, experts say, could help counter stale job skills, age discrimination and other challenges that may otherwise sideline many in the nation’s graying work force.

“It can be very successful if it’s a career in demand,” Billy Wooten, Experience Works’ co-executive director, based in Savannah, said of these so-called “encore” careers. But to compete effectively in the job market, older workers also need to brush up on their technology and interviewing skills, he said.

Many haven’t done job interviews in years. “A lot of people don’t know how to sell themselves,” Wooten said.

Older workers often are hindered by employer perceptions that they are more costly and less flexible than younger workers, he said. But such attitudes seem to be declining as the dearth of workers behind the aging baby boom generation raises the prospect of talent shortages, he said.

“Very shortly, the majority of our work force is going to be older” than 55, said Wooten. “They really can’t discriminate against themselves.”

But aging job seekers and employers alike will still face a complex tangle of conflicting forces as baby boomers born between 1946 and 1963 head toward retirement at the same time the nation recovers from its worst recession in decades.

This is a story of how a handful of people in that generation or a bit younger are retooling their job skills to move on to new careers. One lost her job. One took a buyout. Another feared that his job would be outsourced. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will periodically revisit them to see how they’re faring.

From mechanic to nurse

Wesley Myers, 49, worked for Delta Air Lines for 24 years as an aircraft mechanic. He eventually rose to the position of quality assurance incident investigator, where he looked into possible lapses in the airline’s maintenance procedures.

But on a recent Monday morning at Georgia Perimeter College in Clarkston, Myers was standing next to a hospital bed, notebook in hand, as an instructor showed how to suction out the breathing tube of a plastic dummy. Like several other nursing students in the lab, Myers would have to practice the sterile procedure before demonstrating it to an instructor for a grade. If he flubs the procedure three times, he could be booted from the nursing program.

“I tell you right now, it’s a lot of pressure,” said Myers, from McDonough.

Myers, who went through similar check-outs as a mechanic, said he’s excited to be training in a new field that he hopes will offer more job flexibility and opportunities to directly help people. When he first went to work for Delta as a hydraulic mechanic, he enjoyed watching passengers boarding the planes, but later jobs took him farther and farther from the flight line.

“Delta’s always been very good to me,” said Myers. But after taking pay cuts, surviving several rounds of job cuts and watching friends lose their jobs, he was ready for a change. His wife, a nurse for 16 years, had been telling him for years that he would make a good nurse. When Delta offered an early-retirement package last year, he decided to take it.

He had started taking prerequisite courses at Perimeter College in 2006; last year, he entered the nursing program full-time.

“I think I’m really going to like this,” said Myers. “I like going into hospital rooms and talking to people, learning their names.”

From his clinical practice sessions at the hospital, he also sees reason to be optimistic about his new career choice.

“There’s a huge nursing shortage,” he said. “I’ve seen it in my clinical. They definitely need people.”

He hopes to graduate in 2011. But first, he said, he needs to practice his tracheotomy care procedures, and he had an exam later that day.

“Nursing school is tough,” said Myers. “I didn’t know it was going to be this tough. But failure isn’t an option.”

From airline to nonprofits

Mari McCoy, 52, had decided several years ago to start working part-time on a degree at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies so that she could someday work as a manager of a nonprofit organization.

“I’ve always been a rah-rah cheerleader at Delta,” she said, helping back various charitable causes such as Habitat for Humanity, one of her favorite organizations. “This just seemed like a natural fit.”

But, she said, when she felt pushed into retirement in late 2008 by Delta, the former manager in the airline’s cargo division decided to start going full-time.

“I was told my position had been eliminated,” she said. When she got home that day, she said, she got on the computer and switched her enrollment.

“I’ve got the corporate experience, but without a degree, employers wouldn’t have looked at me,” said McCoy, who has hired more than 100 people herself over the years. “That is today’s reality. ... You set your minimum qualifications as high as you possibly can.”

But McCoy, who expects to graduate this month, hopes she now has a good chance to get around such barriers. She recently was one of two students at the public policy school to get the Gov. Joe Frank Harris Award for her academic record.

“I’m excited,” she said. It may not be easy, but she expects to land a job she can be happy with. “I know I may not get what I was making at Delta, but I am new in my career.”

From help desk to engineer

Most of Douglas Hartley’s classmates at Georgia Tech are men about half his age.

“I get to tell them stories about the real world,” said Hartley, 41, who followed a circuitous route before arriving on campus in early 2007 with plans to study energy efficiency and mechanical engineering.

Two decades earlier, he had begun working in film and video production after getting a degree at the University of South Carolina. But after several years, he developed back problems that precluded such physical work.

He went back to the university to take computer science classes, and got a job as a computer help desk technician at an insurance company.

“That was right after the dot-com bubble burst,” he said. He didn’t like what he was seeing. Many companies were outsourcing jobs like his to India and elsewhere overseas.

Besides, environmental issues had always interested him, and he had discovered when he “started this back-to-school stuff” a decade ago that he liked math. “When I started this I could barely add and subtract,” he said.

But a little over three years after entering Georgia Tech, he likes how things are adding up. The field he’s specializing in — testing the systems of new buildings and producing “green building” ratings known as LEED certifications — is booming.

“There’s a huge market for it,” he said, as more government agencies and corporations have turned to such audits to cut costs and reduce energy and water consumption.

Indeed, even before he graduates in May, Hartley already has a job lined up at WorkingBuildings, an Atlanta firm that does building quality-control testing and LEED certifications. He now works there part-time after initially working as an intern.

“They asked if I wanted some time off” after graduation, he said. “I said I didn’t have any money.”