Older Job Seekers Get a Helping Hand

Betty Armstrong had been out of work since 1970. She had her last job interview in 1947.

She did not know how to make her way back to the workaday world.

“I imagined all kinds of things that might come up,” Armstrong said while recalling her 1981 decision to find a full-time job. “I don’t think I’d even had a job interview since 1947,” when she won a job at a Convair plant. She held that job for more than 22 years, until a pair of family illnesses forced her to leave.

“I was very hesitant about it, and I didn’t know exactly where to start,” Armstrong said. “I didn’t know whether to go to a temporary service or what.

“I was all by myself, and financially I needed to go back to work.”

That money crunch is a growing problem for older people, according to Evelyn Herrmann, who directs San Diego’s municipal senior citizens programs. During the first half of this year, the number of people applying for the relatively few part-time jobs that Herrmann has to dole out increased by 40% to 151.

“Rents are going out of line and so is the cost of living,” Herrmann said. “There is a great demand for working privileges among older people, and there is age discrimination.”

Armstrong credits her daughter with telling her about a program that helps older people return to the work force. Armstrong, then 60, linked up with Proven Programs, a federally funded program sponsored by the San Diego Private Industry Council that helped guide her through the job-seeking maze.

“I got a job through them, and I still have it,” Armstrong said. “I’m very grateful to them.” She works at Children’s Hospital and Health Center.

“We happen to think that older is better,” said Leigh Joseph, a Proven Programs “graduate” who helps older job-seekers tackle the often laborious task of finding a job.

Proven Programs serves 75 to 100 clients each year who are given classroom training and on-the-job experience. Now in its ninth year, Proven Programs specializes in training and retraining people age 45 to 65 who need help to land a permanent job.

“There’s a need for training or retraining in this age group,” said Len Hansen, founder of El Cajon-based Senior World magazine. “There’s a desire by a lot of people to go back to work--and notice I’m not even saying need, but desire.”

In a tight economy, Herrmann said, the employment picture grows even tighter for older job seekers. “I had a woman in here who volunteered to work for free for an employer,” Herrmann said. “But the company turned her down and went for some cute little thing. That’s the way the world works.”

To avoid that kind of frustration, and to boost its placement ratio and help ensure that its federal funding continues, Proven Programs “screens an awful lot,” said Pat Reardon, a counselor and coordinator. Instead of providing complete training for unskilled older people, Proven Programs concentrates on training those who already have skills. That focus is necessary, program administrators say, because of the heavy cost involved in training an unskilled person. “We’re interested in employable older people because there are jobs for them in the private sector,” she said.

While some clients appear “job ready,” others are placed in schools and training programs. Proven Programs often turns to the business community to help tailor those programs.

“I assisted with the development of a new (clerical) curriculum,” said Wini Van Huizen, director of employee relations at U.S. Elevator Co. “I was very impressed with the people I worked with.”

Proven Programs seemed willing to “listen to us about what we, the employer, would be looking for in someone who passed the program,” Van Huizen said. “That was important because you don’t want to be reinventing the wheel each time you hire someone.”

Although the program is geared toward adults between the ages of 45 and 65, it is limited to economically disadvantaged county residents. The program also concentrates on candidates who are most likely to succeed in their search for a new job because “even older people with skills can’t always get jobs,” Reardon said.

“There are many people (in that age group) who are still very vital, experienced and capable,” said Joseph, 58.

Mavine (Midge) Wrbanich, 62, worked from 1951 until her employment record fell apart in the 1970s after a divorce and subsequent health problems. “It threw me into a tailspin,” she explained.

When she decided to re-enter the working world in 1982, she turned to Proven Programs for counseling and training.

“They helped us learn how to write resumes, to find where jobs are, and they talked about the importance of dressing right. A lot of people needed that kind of thing,” Wrbanich said.

Proven Programs helped her win a full-time switchboard job with Home Federal Savings & Loan. Wrbanich was recently transferred to a data entry job, and she plans to work until she turns 65, although health problems may force an earlier retirement.

Wrbanich said that although she rarely feels old, she resented employers who subtly used age as the reason for not hiring her.

“You really felt it, even though they don’t say that age is the reason,” Wrbanich said. “But I just sort of ignore them and go my own way.”

Some of Proven Programs’ success is directly linked to the on-the-job training it provides skilled job seekers. In some instances, Proven Programs uses its federal funds to reimburse as much as half of a company’s costs during that training period.

American Mailing Equipment, a small Kearny Mesa company that rebuilds and repairs postage machines and paper-handling equipment, took advantage of that reimbursement program when it trained and later hired Geoffrey Harman, 59, who retired in 1981 after working in a tuna packing plant and a Navy warehouse.

“I felt we had lot of 20- to 25-year-old employees, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, I figured there was probably a vast pool of mature workers” to choose from, said William Gillesby, American Mailing’s founder. “I was looking for someone with all the Boy Scout virtues, for someone who could act as a role model for all of us.”

Proven Programs sent Harman to American Mailing for a six-week training program, after which the company unhesitatingly hired him to repair mailing machines.

When Harman, now 62, announced his intention to retire last month, Gillesby said he jokingly told him that his “request was denied. I told him to come back in 10 or 20 years.”

“Here was a man who had been tossed onto the scrap heap,” Gillesby said. “He is the kind of person I’d want to know even if I’d never had a chance to work with him.”

Harman’s view: “I guess I could stay on ,but it’s getting a little tiring. I don’t consider myself old, though. That’s all a matter of what you think of yourself.”