Environment Jobs for the Retrained Engineers Scarce : Economy: Southland universities, with government aid, taught the courses. But education planners had not realized the lack of demand.

In the clatter of a crowded Santa Ana office, a woman, pencil poised, drones into the phone: “Have you been convicted of any crime, misdemeanor or felony?”

This is Jobs Plus, where Orange County helps retrain and find jobs for ex-convicts, for people on welfare, for factory workers who have been laid off.

But the unemployment lines these days are full of engineers and executives with college degrees--and Jobs Plus can’t just send them over to the local community college to learn auto mechanics.

For the first time, universities across Southern California, armed with government funds, are jumping into retraining, turning laid-off defense industry engineers into environmental consultants.

Despite the expenditure of several hundred thousand dollars, however, these programs so far have proved more well-intentioned than effective.

Consider the case of Dennis Mears.

Mears, 46, pads around his girlfriend’s sunny condominium in Irvine nowadays, collecting a pile of rejection letters grown an inch high.

Once he worked on the space shuttle; now he’s landed a job as a security guard at $6 an hour. For a while, his Oldsmobile was home. Not too long ago, out of work for a year, he applied to be a part-time meter reader. When he got to the gas company in Anaheim half an hour early, there was a line down the block--hundreds of people for a dozen jobs.

Mears’ tale isn’t much different from tens of thousands of other aerospace workers in Southern California. Cuts in defense spending dumped these people on the street with skills, like designing missiles, that no one seems to want any more.

Jobs Plus in Orange County picked Mears and 18 other out-of-work engineers and hired Cal State Long Beach to train them as environmental engineers.

It took six months and cost taxpayers $133,000.

So far, only seven graduates have found permanent jobs as environmental engineers since the training ended in October.

“I’m not some kid coming out of college, stars in his eyes,” said Mears, a catch in his voice. “I was a manager. I made nearly $50,000 a year. I know I’m not going to get that much starting out in a new career.

“But I am disappointed and hurt that nobody’ll hire me.”

What happened?

First, it turned out that there were no jobs in environmental engineering either.

Just two years ago, environmental engineers were so rare that consulting firms fought to pay graduates right out of school $50,000 a year.

The fastest-growing field was finding and cleaning up hazardous wastes for people buying land and buildings. But that work dwindled as the real estate boom of the 1980s petered out.

Then it turned out that Jobs Plus was far better at finding jobs for blue-collar workers than for professionals. The agency’s marketing efforts, according to the engineers, were earnest but amateurish.

“Remember, this is new to us,” said Mark Mathews of Jobs Plus. “We’re still learning how to market these people.”

Finally, some environmental firms won’t hire middle-aged aerospace engineers, especially if they have only a continuing-education certificate and no experience.

What’s more, Cal State Long Beach copied a program in Los Angeles that was supposed to have been a model for the nation but had actually achieved meager results.

Los Angeles Trade-Technical College put 50 engineers through a program run by a professor from USC--one group of 26 last fall, the rest in the spring. Eight hundred engineers applied. But the environmental business was already bad; the course hadn’t even finished before one of the environmental engineers who had helped screen applicants got laid off from his own job.

Only about 16 graduates, the college says, found permanent, paying jobs in environmental engineering--and some grads say that estimate is too high.

“These kinds of programs can create a lot of misery,” said Pratap Bulsara, 54, one of the few to land a job. “Months of tests, classes on Saturdays, and at the end people ask: ‘For what?’ ”

Bulsara has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering but was out of work more than two years before getting an entry-level engineering job at the state Environmental Protection Agency. He approves permits for hazardous waste treatment plants.

Then there’s the government-sponsored program just ending at USC, which offered a more impressive credential--a master’s degree. The 18 engineers were supposed to have jobs by now. Only four do.

The cost to the City of Los Angeles: $8,000 per student and another $3,000 each for anyone who gets a job.

USC says it’ll still take a $3,000 loss on each student because it usually charges $14,000 tuition for a master’s degree in engineering.

Yet other universities are lining up to get into retraining, even though four-year colleges have little experience finding jobs for people in the middle of their careers.

UC Irvine, for instance, unsuccessfully sought federal funds to start a retraining program recently.

“The problem with most programs is there’s no satisfactory way of predicting what the labor market is going to look like down the road,” said Duane Leigh, an economics professor at Washington State University.

“So retraining people is easy. Finding them work afterward isn’t.”

The best programs, experts say, persuade employers to hire graduates before training starts. No jobs, no retraining.

“That way the government and the trainees don’t bear all the risk,” said Richard W. Moore of Cal State Northridge’s business school.

“The government isn’t out its money, the trainee isn’t out his time and you don’t build up huge training programs where nobody gets a job.”

Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, for instance, doesn’t get paid by the state until a graduate gets a permanent job in environmental engineering. So the school is in a fix--it’s out the $6,200 it spent training each engineer until they find jobs.

That hard-nosed approach is courtesy of the California Employment Training Panel. It’s one of the few state agencies in the nation that doesn’t pay up until the graduates get a job. Los Angeles Trade-Technical College says it had employers lined up, but they backed out when the consulting business went bad.

“I’ll be honest--I haven’t been particularly elated by all this,” said Hilda Tomberlin, a dean at the school. “But panning the program (because of a business downturn) is terrible.”

None of this, though, has deterred Cal State Fullerton, which, with the federal government, will devote $1.1 million to retraining 90 engineers. At more than $12,000 per student, it is the most expensive retraining program yet.

This time the idea is to teach a smattering of environmental courses to engineers laid off from defense factories. That way--the theory goes--small manufacturers that can’t afford full-time environmental engineers will hire these people instead.

It’s an interesting approach, experts say, and it might work. But Cal State Fullerton isn’t guaranteeing anybody a job.

Instead, everyone gets an internship; the university hopes that leads to a job.

“We don’t want to be an employment agency,” said Hasan Sehitoglu, one of the engineering professors who designed the program. “This is an educational institution, not a placement service.”

As for the 90 graduates, there’s no guarantee they’ll fare any better than the people from the other programs, most of whom can do little but take odd jobs and wait for the environmental business to turn around.

At least environmental engineering jobs will probably make a comeback when the economy improves--unlike aerospace, where there’s little hope.

“Environmental engineering is still the coming thing,” said Bruce E. Rittmann, former president of the Assn. of Environmental Engineering Professors who teaches at Northwestern University in Illinois. “The business isn’t in nearly as bad a shape in the rest of the country.

“California is the only place I know where they’re actually laying off people.”

That’s small consolation to Lewis Stephens, 53, who once worked on the space shuttle and the B-1B bomber and who began selling Nissans after his $253 a week in unemployment benefits ran out. Stephens made it through the Cal State Long Beach program, and he isn’t optimistic.

“A boom in the environmental business isn’t here yet,” he said between sips from a cafeteria coffee cup. “And let’s face it, another job in aerospace just isn’t going to happen.”

He is on his way out the door when he turns and--only half-jokingly--says: “If I can ever put you in a Nissan. . . .”