Jim and Kimberlee Dornan of Litchfield Park were real-estate appraisers making a combined six-figure income before the market fell apart. Kimberlee has now turned a federally funded agency that helps the unemployed find new careers.

by Chad Graham - Jun. 28, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

With many jobs gone for good, workers hit ‘reset’ on plans

Less than 36 months ago, Arizona was flush with the kind of jobs that flourish in a booming economy: real-estate agents, construction workers, title officers, interior designers and boutique owners.

Not anymore. Work that was plentiful and professions that once provided a decent living without requiring much advanced education have been wiped out by the recession. And those jobs may never return in the large numbers once seen. Workforce experts believe the global meltdown hit a reset button on the labor market.

Industries that have been critical to Arizona’s growth-based economy for decades are undergoing significant and permanent changes. These changes likely would have come eventually, but they have been accelerated by the deep recession.

Now, for many, the pain of joblessness is combined with the stress of having to decide how to make a major career change.

Jobs in real estate and financial services will never return to pre-recession numbers as the federal government places more regulations on the industry. And the retail field, a major engine for job growth before the economic meltdown decimated it, may not fully recover if consumers, who last month saved at their highest rate in 15 years, permanently cut their spending habits.

The changing economy means that thousands of Arizonans may never get their old jobs back, which in turn means they will need more education or training to earn good wages in the future. And they should consider career paths that will be in high demand in the coming years, such as health care and green technology.

These jobs may range from positions that don’t require a college degree, such as air-conditioning servicing or solar-panel installation, to high-skilled, high-paying jobs in advanced manufacturing and emerging industries.

They will also need to be careful not to choose a career in which good jobs continue to be automated or shipped overseas. Having a college degree won’t protect a worker from upheaval in the global economy, but fresh skills, training and flexibility often will.

When the recession ends and the jobs market does rebound, it will look different for many of today’s unemployed.

“Things never snap back to where they were after a recession,” said Marc Tucker, president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington. “That (trend) will be truer for this recession than it has been in most others, with respect to jobs coming back.”

As the global economy changes, workers must become more resilient, said economist Dennis Hoffman, director of the L. William Seidman Research Institute at ASU.

“They’re going to have to be constantly aware that in order to be prosperous, they’re going to have to continually find ways to add value to their firm,” he said. “When they can’t figure out a way to add that value, you and your boss are going to mutually decide you’ll figure it out somewhere else.”

Retraining, retooling

Arizona’s unemployment rate in May was 8.2 percent, compared with 9.4 percent nationally, but its percentage of job loss has been consistently among the worst in the country.

Some of the roughly 230,000 Arizonans who’ve been laid off since the recession began in December 2007 already have started to retool, realizing they need additional skills to find a good job and ensure a secure future.

The recession has become “a mandate for becoming educated about the market and becoming very aware about your own ability to find a skill that will fit in a new-economy job - in the shortest amount of time possible,” said Barbara Poole, founder and president of EmployAid, a career services Web site based in Ridgefield, Conn.

Kimberlee Dornan, 50, is one of those trying to find a new direction with the help of Maricopa Workforce Connections, a Department of Labor-funded agency that helps the unemployed find new careers.

In 2002, the Litchfield Park resident joined her husband, Jim, 53, as a real-estate appraiser.

The stay-at-home mom obtained the certification in just three weeks. The couple eventually made a combined six-figure income before the real-estate market imploded.

Jim lost his job in March as a staff appraiser for a company. The appraisal business that Kimberlee owned has all but dried up.

“A lot of the mortgage companies that we did work with are all just gone,” she said.

New rules - stemming from the housing meltdown - require lenders to order most home appraisals directly from appraisers. This can cut the mortgage broker out of the process, and many Valley appraisers have built businesses through relationships with brokers.

Kimberlee supports the new regulation. But the changes have led her to consider a new career because the business may never be as lucrative as it once was.

“We didn’t foresee the industry coming to what it has,” said Kimberlee, who hopes to get her certification as an administrative clerk and possibly become a title examiner.

“Our son has an (appraisal) license as well, and we encouraged him a long time ago not to put all of his eggs in this one basket. . . . He’s finishing up his business degree and he can go in a different direction,” she said.

From No. 1 to 50

As the economy boomed earlier this decade, many Arizonans didn’t have to ponder how they’d thrive professionally in the 21st century.

The unending supply of thousands and thousands of new residents expanded the economy as never before - and made it seem as if there always would be plenty of growth-related jobs, bigger paydays and opportunities for advancement.

Arizona ranked No. 1 for job growth.

In 2006, “one out of every 52 jobs in the United States is found in Arizona,” the Arizona Blue Chip Economic Outlook reported at the time, but “Arizona accounted for one out of every 15 new jobs created.”

Today, it ranks 50th as its overreliance on housing led to a historic bust.

The state’s current job performance is the worst of any recession since the Great Depression, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“The Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale economy is hemorrhaging jobs at an accelerating pace as the housing downturn intensifies,” a Moody’s Economy.com report said in May.

And unemployed Arizonans can’t afford to wait for their old jobs to return.

An Arizona Department of Commerce forecast released in April showed across-the-board job losses through at least 2010, particularly in construction and professional/business services.

Only the private education and health services sector is predicted to consistently add jobs. That category includes nurses, lab technicians and employees at for-profit universities.

Even executives are vulnerable.

“When times are bad, it causes organizations to analyze every piece of their business and determine what they can do better so they can be profitable,” said Scott Smith, managing partner at Phoenix-based executive search firm TowerHunter Inc.

He is hearing about plenty of Valley companies reviewing the roles of their senior talent and “determining if that is the talent that they’ll need in that new and changing environment,” Smith said. “What worked for a senior leader a year ago may not work in 2010.”

Bright spots

Even though the jobless rate continues to rise, there are still about 2.5 million job openings nationally, according to the Labor Department.

While that is the lowest count since the agency began tracking the figure in 2000, companies nationally are having difficulty finding experienced engineers, nurses, skilled tradesmen, and teachers, according to a Manpower Inc. survey in May.

“These results indicate that while more people may be looking for jobs, they don’t generally have the skills that organizations are looking for,” the organization found.

Gilbert resident Lance Oden, 36, is an example of someone who realized his retail job was vulnerable and he did what experts recommend: retrained in a new field with more opportunity.

He left his position at a sporting-goods store and enrolled in the Refrigeration School Inc. in Phoenix, which trains students for jobs such as air-quality controller, facilities-maintenance manager, building engineer, electrician and refrigeration technician.

No matter how the economy is performing, his new field will remain strong, Oden said. “Medical, air-conditioning and food are three things people are going to need on a daily basis,” he said.

Mesa couple Tomacha and Anthony Carter, 39 and 42, also identified a growing profession when they decided to switch careers. They left their collections jobs and enrolled in the accelerated online Dental Assisting program at Rio Salado College.

They plan to become dental hygienists, a career that should provide a good living into the future.

“We wanted to get into something that would not be shipped overseas,” Tomacha Carter said. “They can’t just take your mouth and send it overseas.”

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