Lost Your Job? Change Career

ByABC News
November 21, 2002, 3:13 PM

Nov. 22 -- Cara Alcantar, a former customer service worker at WorldCom, thought she'd have her job until retirement.

"This was a company we thought we would probably be in forever," she says now of her four-year stint at the company. "They told us how lucky we were to be there and to work there. And we were."

Then Alcantar was laid off in early July. She is now working as a special projects coordinator for labor union AFL-CIO, a job that grew out of her activism last summer on behalf of WorldCom workers who were let go from the company. She picked up and moved from her home town of Phoenix to the Washington, D.C., area to take the job.

Alcantar is one of the lucky ones she's doing something she enjoys, and making more money. But others out of work are faced with either staying in the same industry for less money, or changing fields altogether.

Ben Barile, a 43-year-old Poughkeepsie, N.Y., resident, worked with WorldCom for almost 14 years as a software developer. Since he was let go at the end of June, Barile has had an uphill battle finding comparable work. Some of the job openings he's seen in his field are paying $7 an hour a far cry from the $30 he was making at WorldCom.

"You're better off staying on unemployment," he says. "It's not much, but it's better than $7 an hour."

Now Barile says he is considering going back to school in January to study something else, or opening up his own consulting business from home.

It's been a tough year for workers in a many industries that have been devastated by the recession, especially those who love their chosen field. The dismal hiring situation has forced many former employees to either look for a comparable job in other industries, or change their career path altogether.

Hot Jobs Are Out There

Sectors that have been hardest hit include technology, telecommunications, travel and manufacturing.

Aircraft parts manufacturing, for example, has shed 62,000 workers, or 13.5 percent of its total workforce, in the year ended October, according to the latest Labor Department figures. The transportation and public utilities sector has lost 248,000 jobs, with 112,000 jobs coming from the communications sector alone. Manufacturing has dropped 700,000 jobs in the past year.