WORKPLACE

Opening Day Promotion: Here’s one way to drum up some publicity for your new company: Don’t charge the first 25 customers.

That’s what Proactive Institute in Costa Mesa is doing next week when it opens its doors. Proactive teaches people job-finding skills for a hefty fee: The five-day, 10-hour course costs a minimum $1,800.

For that kind of dough, you’re definitely not going to learn prosaic stuff like how to design a resume.

Proactive says it teaches you instead what to put on the resume: How to define your accomplishments in the most salable terms. It’ll also tell you how to plan to get the job you want.

Proactive President Tony Burnham learned his job-counseling skills at Carnation Inc. in Los Angeles after the food company was bought by the Swiss concern Nestle SA in 1985. In the next few years, Burnham, as chief personnel officer, presided over the downsizing of the company from 22,000 workers to 8,500, a drop of more than 60%.

In 1990, Burnham himself left. Lately, however, he’s been using those old connections, calling on former colleagues in the personnel departments of big companies in order to drum up business for Proactive. Among those he’s visited: Bank of America, which expects to lose tens of thousands of jobs after it merges with Security Pacific, another mega-bank.

It’ll likely be businesses that are his biggest customers, says Burnham, since most people can’t afford the fees Proactive charges. In the long run, he contends, those businesses will save money because his students will get jobs faster and incur fewer outplacement costs.

There haven’t been any bites yet, though. And so it looks for now like the only customers on opening day, says Burnham, will be those getting the freebies.