Laid-Off High-Tech Workers Find Life Beyond Aerospace : Economy: Three-city agency offers training, inspiration and morale building for displaced employees.

Donald Baker, a 53-year-old manufacturing engineer from San Pedro, is among 600,000 Californians forced to find life beyond aerospace because of layoffs in the hard-hit industry over the last three years.

What was surprising, Baker says now, was the discovery that there was a difference between what he did well and what he liked to do.

“I’m beginning to realize I never really enjoyed being an engineer,” he said.

Five months after losing his job at Rohr Industries in the City of Commerce, Baker is pursuing a dream, looking for grant money to develop a low-cost desalination process he invented. And he has enrolled in bookkeeping classes at Harbor College to provide him with a marketable skill while pursuing his dream.

With the help of a new program at El Camino College, Baker has crossed what career counselors say is the most critical point in the search for life beyond aerospace. He realizes that he is not going back to work in the industry and is actively looking for ways to adapt past work experience to new fields.

The 10-week career program, funded through the U.S. Labor Department, is the only one like it in the Southland for aerospace’s well-paid, high-technical work force, said Mary Ann Pranky, employment and training analyst in charge of displaced worker programs at the Carson-Lomita-Torrance Private Industry Council.

According to Pranky, her three-city area alone has 8,000 aerospace workers out of jobs. Along with one in the Inglewood area, her office channels the displaced workers into the El Camino program, where they can begin learning how to build everything from a resume to a small business to self-esteem.

“One of the things I’ve seen,” said Gwen Thompson, the program’s director, “is that they get here . . . feeling that they’re a victim and somehow, through the course, they (become) less and less a victim.”

Though aerospace layoffs started swelling California’s unemployment rolls three years ago, Pranky said, the El Camino program did not start until last October. So far, 15 people have been through one of the 10-week sessions.

California Private Industry Council officials, Pranky said, had a hard time persuading Labor Department officials in Washington that, just as displaced blue-collar workers need help when their jobs dry up, so do educated, white-collar workers need help in forging new career paths.

“The aerospace group has really been a different kettle of fish,” Pranky said. “The professionals--their self-identity is so related to the aerospace industry that it’s hard for them to (consider other careers). Even though their company (may have) laid off over 16,000 people, they think they’ll be hired back.”

Also, Pranky said, aerospace workers tend to concentrate on their specific job skills and do not develop relationships with fellow professionals. When they get laid off, she said, they have no support group to turn to.

In the El Camino program, which draws people used to earning anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000 a year, group support is one of the most important elements.

“They’re motivating each other,” Thompson said.

Dan Selleck, a 38-year-old systems manager from Palos Verdes, said this support is valuable even if no two people in the group are going in the same direction.

Laid off a year ago by Rockwell International, Selleck plans to enter the growing field of environmental auditing, working in either the public or private sectors monitoring such things as air emissions.

“I spent the last 12 years working on weapons. I’m going to spend the next 12 working on things to clean up the world,” he said.

Selleck, who has a strong background in production and management auditing, plans to begin taking college classes in environmental auditing.

Frederic Whitson, a 57-year-old research and development specialist in the El Camino program, is taking a new look at how to transfer his expertise as an electrical engineer to computers or, perhaps, to research and development in other industries.

“The thought of aerospace is completely out,” said Whitson, who lost his job at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach more than a year ago.

One of the first things Whitson did when he joined the El Camino program was learn how to rewrite his resume to stress his skills, rather than for whom he had worked for during the past 30 years.

In the program, participants also go through mock job interviews that they videotape and play back so they can assess their performance. They help one another prepare for the real job interviews they get and help one another go over afterward what went right and what went wrong.

For most of the displaced aerospace workers, the path to new careers will be creating opportunities themselves, said Frank Stokes, a human resources consultant who was hired along with Thompson to run the program at El Camino.

Networking, the career buzzword of the 1980s, is not a very valuable strategy in the current job market, Stokes said. There are too many people out of work at once and aerospace jobs are vanishing, not just being reshuffled.

Sixty-three percent of all the new jobs, Stokes said, are being found informally or being created by the job-seeker himself.

Jeff Hamelau of Lomita is one of those creating his own job and his own business, which he has named Conceptive Co. When he was working at McDonnell Douglas, Hamelau was an analytical trouble-shooter for management, sent into areas where there were production problems, where new products were needed or where the company was looking for ways to cut costs. His new business acts as a trouble-shooter for engineering, design and manufacturing businesses.

In this job market, Hamelau said, “you either work to create a job for yourself or you roll over and flip hamburgers.”

There are compromises, though. When he worked for McDonnell Douglas, Hamelau used to wear tennis shoes, blue jeans, western shirts and a ponytail down his back. Now he has short, slicked-back hair, leather shoes and a suit and tie and hangs out at local Chamber of Commerce meetings so he can introduce his new firm to the businesses represented there.

A feeling of self-worth and satisfaction in the rest of one’s life is important for those exploring new career options, said the program participants.

“I don’t have a job right now,” Selleck said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other aspects of my life.”

Baker, pulling a picture of a woman from his wallet, said, “If there wasn’t life after aerospace, I wouldn’t be getting married May 2.”