SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WORKING INTO THE NEXT CENTURY : MID-CAREER CRUNCH : NO ROOM AT THE TOP : Opportunities Narrow for 70 Million Baby Boomers

You go to a decent school. You graduate and get a job. You put in long hours, eager to show you’ve got the right stuff. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but you inch your way up the ranks. The years pass. Your paycheck grows.

Then one day it hits you with the clarity of a morning alarm clock: You’re not moving up anymore.

For more than 70 million Americans known as the baby boom generation--a group whose expectations can only be described as boundless--the scenario is starting to hit painfully close to home. Many of the older baby boomers are past 40 now. And they are beginning to understand that their climb up the corporate ladder will stop somewhere short of the top rung.

Members of the generation born after World War Two until about 1964--in many ways the beneficiaries of an adoring society--may find their career fortunes determined by cold, simple arithmetic:

“Instead of 10 candidates for a position in the ‘60s--and 20 in the ‘70s--there are 30 people wanting one management position,” said Michael Jimerson, a manager of resources and planning at Rockwell International’s aerospace operations in El Segundo. He added a warning note: “And this is just the beginning.”

According to experts in human resources, it is the beginning of an era in which employees and their employers will view each other differently than they have in the past. They will expect different things of each other. And they no doubt will be bewildered at times, as a generation’s limitless expectations collide with an economy’s limited possibilities.

It is not as dismal as it sounds. More Americans are employed than at any time in history, and the economy continues to expand. In Southern California alone, 2.5 million jobs will be created by early in the next century, analysts predict.

And already, employers say they are enhancing opportunities for workers caught in the squeeze. Some optimists even foresee the dawning of a newly compassionate workplace where decision-making is more democratic and more employers provide day care and other services.

Universities and colleges, meanwhile, are helping people shift gears at mid-career with an emphasis on adult courses and career counseling. And the entrepreneurial surge that blossomed in the 1980s seems sure to beckon the discontented in the 1990s.

Clearly, workers will respond to the pressures in varied ways. For Donald Bailey, a one-time Los Angeles policeman, the career crunch forced a changing of priorities. “I realized everybody wasn’t going to be sergeant or lieutenant--and there was nothing wrong with me if I didn’t, “ recalled Bailey, now 43. “There were just too many of us.”

In July, 1986, Bailey left the Los Angeles Police Department after 17 years and opened a McDonald’s restaurant downtown with his wife, Andrea. Today, he says the move has paid off handsomely: “I have a better understanding of what I want out of life.”

Not everyone will respond by launching a new venture. Many, weary of the headaches, may focus instead on values outside the workplace, such as family, hobbies or their community. They are people like the Los Angeles marketing executive, 37, with a 21-month-old son, who said he may become a chef in order to find “regular, rewarding work that you can shut off when you leave the office.”

Linda Short, a vice president of human resources at Bank of America in San Francisco, said the baby boomers provide special challenges: “This group expects more than a desk and a job. They’re motivated, and they’re after challenges. If they aren’t intensely challenged, they’ll become frustrated.”

In order to keep the bad feelings to a minimum, “We’ll offer more flexible work styles,” she predicted. “We’ll look at the ways career ladders work. We’ll consider offering time off if they have special desires.”

But she acknowledged: “We have not done much about it up to now.”

How much needs to be done? The baby boom’s march through the workplace guarantees some tensions and hassles. Other things, however, such as the health of the economy and conditions in a particular field, also will influence an individual’s fortunes, said Peter A. Morrison, director of the Population Research Center at the RAND Corp., a think tank in Santa Monica.

“Demography isn’t destiny,” Morrison argued. “You can’t avoid the conclusion that there is going to be congestion on the career ladder. But the adaptability of each member of the generation is probably going to determine the extent to which they get ahead.”

Consider Catherine Bension. By her middle 30s, she had attained a high-level position at a big ad agency. But when she contemplated her future there, it looked like further advancement wouldn’t come swiftly or easily. “There were a lot of people in the organization at my level--and a lot of them were ahead of me in line for the next opportunity,” recalled Bension, 36.

When some executives from the firm quit to launch their own company early last year, they asked her to make the leap with them. The way Bension describes it, the choice came down to choosing between a secure job she felt she could do “in my sleep” or gambling on something that might prove more rewarding--or might fizzle.

She gambled. “As it turns out, it was a fantastic decision,” she said happily. “I have a lot more responsibility than I had there.” And while acknowledging that the new firm doesn’t yet have the financial stability that her former employer did, she maintained: “As you go up the ladder, you have to decide if you’re content to wait until opportunity occurs.”

The baby boom generation--while a diverse group to be sure--is not known for its ability to wait. Many were pampered as they grew up in an increasingly prosperous America after World War II. They typically received more education than their parents and were conditioned by society to believe their horizons were endless.

Whether entering kindergarten in the 1950s, transforming popular culture in the 1960s or struggling for entry level jobs in the lackluster economic conditions of the 1970s, their passages have been noisy ones. And a glance at Census Bureau figures suggests that the coming passage into middle age will not prove simple--at least in the workplace.

In 1980, when the oldest baby boomers were just approaching their middle 30s, 2.5 million Americans were 40. By last July, when the oldest baby boomers were completing their fourth decade, the Census Bureau counted 4 million Americans that age. According to government analysts, the tidal wave of 40-year-olds will not crest until the turn of the century, when more than 4.5 million Americans have reached the year that is often viewed as life’s midpoint.

Just how stormy that passage turns out will in no small way be influenced by the state of the economy. In her 1986 book, “The Plateauing Trap,” Judith M. Bardwick warned that many of today’s workers face a future of limited advancement, compared to the strong gains that were made in the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s: “Now, and for some time into the future, far fewer people will experience the ‘success’ of promotion,” she declared. “The economic prosperity of the postwar period has proved unsustainable. . . . What this means for today’s employees is devastatingly simple: Opportunities for promotion will become relatively scarce, at least until the end of this century.”

Many analysts would argue that the baby boomers have been helped immensely by the economy’s job-creating performance of recent years, and that there is no reason to argue that the growth will disappear, except for temporary downturns.

Yet the baby boomers, along with workers of all ages, have been jolted by certain trends, even as the nation has benefited from economic growth since the early 1980s. Most notably, the move by companies to keep their management ranks “lean and mean” in a world of mergers and takeovers has put a painful squeeze on many highly qualified baby boomers.

“Mid-level management jobs are shrinking, and that’s adding to the problem of keeping these people satisfied,” observed Rockwell’s Jimerson. “The people who are qualified for the jobs are in this very crowded late-30s age group, but Rockwell is flattening out its management structure, and there aren’t as many of these management jobs.”

The 37-year-old marketing executive, who asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing future job possibilities, would surely agree that there’s a squeeze going on. The executive, who holds an MBA degree from Dartmouth and is currently a vice president with a manufacturing firm, said, “Twice--and possibly a third time soon--I’ve been asked to leave my position due to reorganizations and adverse business conditions. And that is a frustrating experience.

“It’s not due to poor performance. It’s due to conditions beyond my control,” he continued. “Basically what you have is a shrinking supply of positions for people at my level. It adds up to a dim future.”

To ensure that such a future is not his, the executive is reassessing his skills and thinking about switching careers, possibility to be a cook.

William Lareau, 40, an industrial psychologist who works at Ford Motor Co.’s truck plant in Louisville, Ky., said that many able baby boomers see the world like this: “If I maneuver and scheme and work hard and be creative, I still can get more than the next guy. Everybody thinks that.” He added: “But if you step back and look at the world, you see that everybody who already has a lot is going to get less.”

In a world where the rewards are limited, employers are starting to reassess ways to enrich people’s jobs in order to make the lack of promotions more palatable, a process still in its infancy.

“Increasingly, we’re talking about job enrichment--not necessarily new job titles,” said Laura Sheppard, human resources director for the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach. “We talk with employees about lateral moves. Or even in some cases, managers might be interested in downward moves to learn a new area.”

Paula Correia, spokeswoman at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which has 5,000 employees, has observed some managers switching from one department to another as a way to keep things interesting. “There have been occupational therapists going back to school to earn business degrees and go into administrative jobs here,” she said.

Such moves can indeed keep people happy, maintains Landon Y. Jones, author of “Great Expectations,” a 1980 book about the baby boom generation, and now managing editor at Money Magazine. “As a manager myself, I see myself doing it.”

Jones said, for example, that he might assign an editor to a six-month special project as a way to provide the individual with a refreshing challenge--without actually changing the editor’s permanent job.

Yet there are doubts about the commitment of companies to job enrichment. “If they really did it, it would help a lot--but most companies just go through the motions,” said Lareau.

In any case, not everybody is endowed with the skills and temperament required of a top manager. And people sometimes deceive themselves about their own abilities, said Jay M. Finkelman, an industrial psychologist with a varied background in management and marketing.

“You can’t avoid noticing that people have a need to defend their own egos,” he said. “They might not be as good as they think they are.”

But Finkelman added that individuals with a healthy degree of self-esteem should be able to take pride in their successes and come to terms with the limits of their careers.

“This is the group that can take satisfaction in what they achieve in their life,” he said, “and not just focus on the percentage increase in their base salary or how much higher their bonus is from one calendar year to another.”

And that leads some experts to foresee a growing acceptance by the baby boom of a rather revolutionary notion for some: that other things besides career success are required for a happy, well-rounded life.

“I almost have the feeling that this clamor for the top is going to subside, that we may be revaluating what do we really want to achieve and what is happiness,” said Bruce Clark, vice president of Age Wave, a Bay Area marketing firm that focuses on aging-related issues.

Such an attitude could ultimately change the way many in a generation of “great expectations” have come to define ambition and success. “It’s quite possible,” said Rand’s Morrison, that a lot of baby boomers “will look to the right and left--and feel that they’re doing as well as the rest of the generation.”

And then, he continued, if they see they are not at the top, they will be able to say without a worry, “Who cares?”