CAREERS : SHIFTING GEARS : Careers for the Ages : Preparing for Brave New World of Work Means Breaking Out of Lock-Step Notions : TOWARD THE END : Seniority Doesn’t Spell Security

Jimmy Crabtree started working at McDonnell Douglas when the aircraft company was setting out to build its very first commercial jet. The year was 1957. He was just out of high school.

Today Crabtree is still at Douglas; he’s one of the lucky ones and he knows it. But after nearly four decades of steady predictability, the 55-year-old engineer, like many of his colleagues, is suddenly confronting the unexpected: For the first time in his long aerospace career, Crabtree’s future is far from certain.

“Truthfully, at my age, there’s not much out there in the way of a job market,” Crabtree admits. “I’m counting on sticking around here.”

Although optimistic, Crabtree finds his situation bewildering. Like most men of his generation, Crabtree was raised to believe career planning is a one-time event in life. You decided what you were going to do when you graduated and--so long as you worked hard--you followed a straight line from that moment until retirement at age 60 or 65.

Now all that has changed.

In the last year dozens of Crabtree’s engineering colleagues have lost their jobs. Of those who looked for new jobs, most have yet to find one.

Many simply retired early--an option Crabtree says isn’t feasible for him, largely because Douglas recently dropped guaranteed lifetime medical insurance for its retirees and dependents.

It was an especially painful blow to Crabtree, whose wife is a quadriplegic. He doesn’t know how he’s going to pay the steady stream of medical bills once the company withdraws its support.

“After that, we have no idea what happens,” Crabtree says. “It was something we kind of counted on. It was one of those things that helped entice us to have a career here--the benefit package for the future. It’s been a real shock for everybody.”

To be sure, the massive cutbacks in the aerospace industry are not limited to older workers. “The young ones have been suffering too,” Crabtree notes. But while many are starting over, switching industries or venturing into business for themselves, Crabtree feels in no position to start something new. “It’s a little late to be thinking about a new career,” he says.

He certainly started out on the right track. As a boy, Crabtree had always been fascinated by aviation. When he heard Douglas was having an open test for drafting trainees, he headed south from his California hometown of Kingsburg to Santa Monica and entered the company’s training program.

“It was an eight-week course held in West Los Angeles,” Crabtree remembers. “I worked six years at the Santa Monica and Culver City plants until I got caught in the 1963 layoffs.”

But in those days, when an aerospace engineer got laid off, he could almost always find a job with a competitor. “It was almost like you could just walk across the street,” Crabtree says. He spent the next six years at North American, working on the Saturn missile launcher for the moon shot--the booster for the Apollo program.

Later he bounced back to Douglas, then to Northrop, on to Rockwell and then back again to Douglas in 1978. “I’ve been here ever since,” Crabtree says. “Twenty-seven-and-a-half years.”

As an engineer in the product support division, Crabtree’s chances for keeping his job are better than most. The 150 engineers in his department handle aircraft that have already been delivered, and there are plenty of planes out there that need service for a long time to come.

But there have been cutbacks all over, and that has meant a quickening in the pace of work--and a heightening of the stress level.

“The way things work today, it’s not a function of seniority. It’s a matter of whether your type of expertise is needed at the moment or not. If you don’t perform, you don’t have a future.”

Employees live in fear of “RIF” slips, the industry acronym for “reduction in force,” which means involuntary layoffs for unspecified amounts of time. In some departments, the clawing to remain employed has led to increased competition among colleagues.

Still, looking back, Crabtree says he has “loved the industry. It’s been good to me.” One thing he would do differently, though: “In the past, I would have recommended it highly to a youngster coming out of college. But based on the way it’s been going I would not recommend it any more.”