The pink slip was white, but just as devastating.
After 19 years in the United Airlines reservations department, Sandie Bobin was among 400 employees to get layoff notices in June when their Kent office closed.
Gone went the dream of spending her career with the same company and retiring with medical benefits, lifetime flight privileges and a solid pension.
“I was taking a real inventory of myself,” the 41-year-old Bothell resident said. “I could see how hard you have to work to stay in the middle class.”
Dan Bates / The Herald
Today, she is studying at Edmonds Community College to become a paralegal under a state Workforce Retraining program, a life ring for dislocated workers who need to change careers.
More than 83,000 people who have lost jobs have gone back to school under the retraining program since the Legislature created it in 1993. It helps pay for tuition, books, fees and other expenses for laid-off workers who qualify for unemployment insurance benefits.
EdCC worker retraining counselor Gina Certain has spent 12 years offering advice to hundreds of dislocated workers. Statewide, more than half are 40 or older.
Between mergers, acquisitions and jobs going overseas, many people are looking for a new start, Certain said.
“Even though the unemployment rate is down, if you look at those unemployed in the state, there are a lot of people,” she said. “We continue to see companies downsizing.”
Statewide, there were 184,800 people who had lost jobs and qualified for unemployment insurance in November, the last month the statistic was available. That included 17,900 in Snohomish County, where the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent.
Certain recommends that people should take classes while they have jobs to help them recover faster when the economy slumps – rather than waiting to be laid off. She points to national statistics that show people with more education are unemployed less often.
She finds four main reasons people end up in her office:
* They expect to be able to retire from their job.
* They worked in a job with a lot of turnover.
* They don’t have a credential for the job they are doing and can’t get hired elsewhere.
* They don’t have updated skills.
With the airline industry reeling after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bobin knew going back to school could help her odds.
“I thought about it many, many times, but you are trying to balance full-time employment with a family,” she said. “It’s just so hard.”
Today, she has 50 pounds of textbooks to lug around but feels optimistic about her decision to return to school.
Bill Seling has a similar story.
He thought he had it made when he left a job at Snohomish County PUD for a bigger paycheck at a startup company where he was a software engineer technical team leader.
It was great while it lasted, but it didn’t last long.
Four years later, in 2004, he was laid off. He figured he would find another job within two months. The market was soft, and there weren’t many jobs matching his expertise.
After a few months, he reread his unemployment benefit brochures and discovered retraining opportunities.
At 54, he went back to school, taking paralegal courses at EdCC with hopes of combining them with his quarter-century of information technology skills.
He said he’s glad he went back to school, despite a smaller paycheck.
“In my case, it was good for me to go back to research, read and write and to get along with more than one generation,” he said. “…It does a lot for your mental state to be working toward something.”
Today, at 56 with two grown children, he is a walking oxymoron: a “full-time temporary” information services analyst with the state Auditor’s Office in Olympia. He lives there during the week and comes home to Lake Stevens on weekends.
He said he’s glad for a job and optimistic he will be able to combine his two skills as he looks for a permanent position closer to home.
“Now, at least, I can market myself better,” he said.
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446 or stevick@heraldnet.com.
A fresh start
Since 1993, the states Worker Retraining program has served 83,380 people who lost jobs and enrolled at community and technical colleges, and another 3,500 who enrolled at private career schools.
Heres a demographic breakdown from 2004 showing who is going back to school:
Median age: 41
Male: 53 percent
Female: 47 percent
High school dropout:
8 percent
High school graduate:
40 percent
Some college: 42 percent
Bachelors degree:
9 percent
Age 40-49: 33 percent
Age 50+: 22 percent
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