Recession Fading for O.C. Jobless : Economy: Many of the Newly Hired Are Making Less : Industrial Hygienist: ‘Lots of companies are closing facilities and have hazardous waste cleanup to contend with.’

Neeltje Mack didn’t have to see a pink slip to know that her days were numbered--she had been watching the ranks thin at TRW’s space and electronics group in Redondo Beach for more than a year.

“They’d started laying off in my department,” said the certified industrial hygienist, “so I knew it was just a matter of time.”

Instead of waiting for the recession to push her onto the jobless rolls, Mack, 37, decided to attack.

She took a personal inventory and decided that her background and training--including graduate degrees in public health and occupational health and safety--made her eminently marketable.

Then she assessed her profession and determined that numerous manufacturing companies were thinning their ranks and turning to outside consultants to provide their industrial health and safety needs, such as designing workplace safety programs and monitoring the workplace for toxic or hazardous materials. The growth, she decided, was in the environmental field.

“With all the military base closures and federally mandated environmental cleanup programs, the military and other government agencies are looking actively at environmental remediation before they can turn their facilities over to the public,” she said. “And on the commercial side, the aerospace industry downsizing means that lots of companies are closing facilities and have hazardous waste cleanup to contend with.”

So, Mack says, she figured that “there are lots of projects out there, and lots of (job) prospects.”

As is typical in white-collar circles, Mack’s approach to job hunting was to “network”--letting friends and acquaintances in her field know that she was interested in changing jobs and by attending seminars, meetings and workshops on environmental health and safety to meet new people and spread the word that she was looking.

Mack said she spent six months on an active job search and received leads on four prospective employers. She filed applications with two companies outside of California, but didn’t look forward to relocating: her children are young enough to handle moving from Southern California without too much upset--son Collin is 2 and daughter Marieke (the Dutch names stay on the distaff side of the family tree) is 5--but husband Jeffrey works as an aerospace industry manager in Los Angeles.

Mack also applied at one other California company before landing an interview in March at Holmes & Narver, an Orange-based international engineering and construction services company that is expanding its environmental cleanup unit.

The company and Mack were an ideal fit, she says--Holmes & Narver is going after the kind of work Mack is interested in, and her background and interests filed the company’s needs.

So the industrial health and safety specialist turned in her resignation to TRW and on April 11 began as the certified industrial hygienist at Holmes & Narver.

Besides the security of working in a growth industry for a change, Mack said her new job also boosted her salary--she now makes “more than $70,000 a year”--to reflect the higher level of work she’s doing.