Labor Day: Job seekers want answers

For Ashley, it didn’t make sense to wait around for a job like the one he lost.

“I couldn’t find anything under my own job skills,” said Ashley, 33. “It’s always good to have your own company.”

Monday will be the third Labor Day since the Great Recession began, pulling Americans into an economic riptide. Virtually every sector lost jobs.

But what kind of downturn is this? Is it simply a nasty cycle that eventually will end? Or is it a fundamental shift in the kinds of skills that are valuable to employers — that is, a structural change in the economy? The more time experts have to assess the market, the better they’ll know.

Still, frustrated job-seekers are left asking key questions: Are my skills obsolete? Or are they just too common?

The answers could send the unemployed back to school, across the country, or into a lower-paying job. Or home to wait it out.

Paris Sirakis, 31, of Sandy Springs, was first laid off from his job as an industrial engineer in 2007. He worked on and off as a consultant before landing another engineering job.

Then last summer, the company outsourced his group’s work.

He went home to Michigan, working in his family’s jewelry business for a few months before he landed a job back in Atlanta through Kelly Services. He’s using his engineering skills as a project manager for a company “in the food and beverage industry.”

Survival is about flexibility and versatility, he said.

“Companies are looking for the best they can get for their dollar. Whatever project they throw at you, you’ve got to be able to handle it.”

Angela Carr, 33, of Atlanta had been a supervisor in a call center, a job that called for both management as well as technical skills. She lost the job when the center closed.

She found a job in the office of First Step Staffing, an organization that helps the homeless find work. She’s thinking about training for the health care field, she said. “I’m starting to think that maybe I need to make changes to change with the economy.”

Moving with the market can be the way to success, said Peter Bourke, author and founder of a Christian career ministry.

But when possible, a job-seeker should look at “ancillary careers where his or her skill set is easily transferable without major re-training,” said Bourke, a principal in Alpharetta-based Complex Sale, a training and consulting company.

If job-seekers have the “wrong” skills right now, it may not be that companies need anything different than they did before. But there are so many unemployed people, companies can demand exactly what they want.

“When they get so many applications, they are looking for ways to disqualify people,” said David Halusic, 31, of Roswell. “I had to find a position that matched up incredibly with me.”

He moved from Los Angeles, where he had been a senior accountant in a retail real estate group, working with shopping centers. That’s what he got hired here to do.

Clearly, some sectors have changed — perhaps permanently. The huge wave of real estate and construction went into reverse. Millions of those workers either moved to other fields — or to joblessness.

That doesn’t prove there’s a long-term structural problem, argued W. Kevin Ward, director of operations for the Construction Education Foundation of Georgia, which monitors programs and courses in trade skills.

Construction workers have surfed cycles before, he said. “In Georgia, we had been short of skilled craftsmen for about 10 years,” Ward said. “[Pre-recession] there were about 7,000 skilled jobs that went unfilled annually.” Workers were in demand. Wages went up.

Despite the currently dismal market, demographics point to recovery, he said. “Prior to the downturn, the average age in the industry was about 50 years old. That means that about half the industry will be reaching retirement age soon. And we have not filled in the places behind them with trained people.”

Georgia’s population will grow, which means more roads, buildings and houses, he said.

Construction was like a large ship that pulled many other vessels. But even if some trade jobs return, many related jobs seem to have vanished. Does that mean that those workers need new skills?

Toby Simmons, 39, of Douglasville, was a financial analyst who got laid off by a supplier of housing materials. A little time on the job market convinced her that the odds of finding a similar job were awful.

“You think about how many people in Atlanta are looking for the same kind of position with the same kind experience. I considered changing my career. I don’t want to say I was desperate.”

She thought about becoming a teacher. The school budget cuts of the past year make her glad that she didn’t. She decided to stick it out with her profession and did contract work through Ajilon, a staffing company. She’s been working since November.

“You always want a permanent job. The concern always is, when this contract is over, will I have another one?” she said. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here, but I keep getting work. Yes, I had to take a pay cut, but it’s better than unemployment.”

Another ebbing sector has been public relations, which floats on the success of client companies.

Laid off from a PR job in the summer of 2009, Dave Payne, 31, of Sandy Springs gave up looking. He applied for a job in Sacramento, then stopped interviewing when he found out they wouldn’t pay relocation expenses.

Instead, he founded Indulj to sell gourmet sweets online. He is encouraged — although profitability still lies over the horizon.

“I can use my PR skills in a different way — promoting myself and my company,” he said. “The bottom line is that I am 31 years old and I don’t have a wife or steady girl friend. There’s only a certain amount of time when you can afford to take these kinds of risks.”

Those are the kinds of risks that most people would have to take — if the economy were shifting structurally. But it’s not, said Daniel Thomas, region vice president of Kelly Services.

Yes, job-seekers need to be flexible, but that’s a function of the odds, he said. “From where I sit, that’s easy to answer. I don’t think it was a shift in the work force skill set. I think it was a pure demand issue.”

Structural change is a challenge — millions of people must retool, retrain and re-school. But saying the economy is simply in a down cycle offers little reassurance, said Barbara Peters, president of First Step Staffing in Atlanta.

“People say it’s demand, but I don’t know if demand is going to come back,” she said. “People have to maintain their skills, but they have to transfer those skills to another kind of position.”

The demands of business and the advances of technology are continually changing what the economy needs.

Moreover, different skills may be in demand in different areas. And that kind of geographical mismatch is intensified now when so many Americans are anchored in place by a home they cannot sell.

So, do unemployed Americans have the wrong skills for this economy?

“For that to be the big story, there’d have to be large numbers of unfilled jobs and vacancies,” said economist Bruce Hirsch of Georgia State University. “And there aren’t. The big story is low demand.”

There are some structural changes. The unemployment rate jumped to double digits last year — up more than 5 percentage points from 2007.

“How much is structural? Maybe one or one-and-a-half percentage points,” Hirsch said.

The recession has forced companies to be hard-headed about hiring, said Dan Campbell, CEO of Duluth-based staffing firm Hire Dynamics.

“Most organizations have been redefining the jobs that they need. Some of them decided, ‘We probably only need 80 percent of the jobs we had before.’ There are jobs out there in most every segment. But there is no doubt it is very competitive for those jobs.”

That sounds like a weak economy — not one that is morphing to something new.

Even as their sales improve, businesses have been hesitant to hire, said Michelle Brewer, senior staffing manager at staffing company Ajilon. “Companies are using contract employees to get their jobs done, to get the overload taken care of.”

Tiffany Herd is betting that it’s just a particularly painful down cycle — and she is someone who has seen both sides of the job search. After a decade working in human resources for a consulting firm, Herd, a 33-year-old from East Point, was laid off at the end of last November.

Because Herd worked in human resources, she knows the drill: She networks aggressively, blasts résumés, uses social media. She has scored a series of interviews and one job offer — paying about 10 percent less than her minimum.

“You have to either bite the bullet or keep looking. I decided to keep looking.”

Her fiancé, an engineer, is also looking for work. They have considered moving, but are shackled by a mortgage.

She has thought about switching fields.

“But I know from my experience as a recruiter, it is very tough to do that,” she said. “Say I wanted to be in sales. They might say, ‘We need somebody with two years of sales,’ and throw me into the junk pile right away.”