Training Program Does Job--for Some : Employment: Federally funded O.C. offices help layoff victims seek new careers. Results are mixed.

After 15 months of joblessness and with his house in foreclosure, Samuel Alexander enrolled in a training program for would-be computer technicians.

The laid-off aerospace worker became a model student and, after 30 weeks of intensive course work in electronics and computer operations at a federally funded program in Anaheim, found work last spring as a technical manager at an electronics firm in Upland. The training, said Alexander, who is now earning $40,000 a year, changed his life.

About the same time, David Cessna, a longtime welder who had been laid off, completed five months of full-time classroom studies and a monthlong unpaid internship at Garden Grove Medical Center for a diploma in medical billing.

Since then, he has collected a stack of rejection letters as tall as his pile of unpaid bills. Discouraged and desperate, Cessna finally took a part-time job last month at a Target department store, where he dons a red uniform and works behind a cash register for $4.45 an hour.

Their experiences illustrate the sharply contrasting results reported by the legions of laid-off workers in Orange County who have come out of retraining camp in recent years. Even with new skills, workers might not find jobs for months, even years, as the economy recovers slowly from recession. They may discover that their training is in fields that are shrinking locally and, if they do land the jobs they seek, they may learn that their earning power has eroded sharply.

“One of the things we do in our counseling is try to bring them to some sense of reality about the wage and the job market. It’s not likely that they will be coming in at the same level,” said Jane O’Grady, administrator of the Orange County job training program. “They are competing not only with more experienced workers but also younger ones who can come in at lower wages.”

Federal retraining money available for displaced workers in Orange County has more than doubled this year to about $5 million compared with 1993, reflecting the latest census and unemployment data. Also, Anaheim received a special federal grant of $1 million earlier this year under the Defense Conversion Act to help laid-off aerospace workers.

Orange County’s success with such programs, which are funded mostly with money provided under the Job Partnership Training Act, mirrors the nationwide average: About seven out of 10 are placed in jobs within three months of completing training.

Those jobs, though, often fall short of workers’ expectations.

Jeff Purdy, 30, was an assembly-line supervisor in June, 1993, when his employer of 11 years, a gas valve manufacturer in Long Beach, shut down. After seven months of appliance technician training at Brownson Technical School in Anaheim, the Santa Ana resident took a job at Sears, Roebuck & Co., having exhausted his unemployment benefits.

Purdy, a high school graduate, now drives a white van that takes him all over Southern California repairing refrigerators. His pay is $8 an hour--about half of what he earned at his previous job.

“I like what I’m doing, I really like the work,” said Purdy, who dreams of buying a house to share with his wife and their 2-year-old son. “But I don’t like the pay. We wanted to have another kid, but it’s financially impossible. We’re living from paycheck to paycheck.”

Another worker said it is not only the wages but also the drop in social status that has been hard for his family to bear. The older worker, who asked that his name not be used, wistfully recalled wearing suits to his $30-an-hour analyst job at an electronics firm until he was laid off in 1990. Two years later, he went through federal retraining.

Today, wearing a blue denim uniform and steel-toed shoes, he fixes plumbing and air conditioning at a Costa Mesa hotel and earns a little over $9 an hour. The job, he said with a hint of resentment in his voice, “keeps the roof over my head and puts bread on the table.”

Federally sponsored retraining programs in Orange County are run by three employment service offices--two in Santa Ana and one in Anaheim--that contract with a network of colleges, vocational schools and other organizations. Their services include career counseling, skill evaluation and job-search assistance.

The larger of the two Santa Ana offices, which services all of Orange County except Anaheim and Santa Ana, helped place 360 laid-off workers in fiscal 1993, the latest year for which data is available. That included 106 jobs in clerical and office work; 82 in mechanical, environmental and other engineering; 37 in appliance repair, and the rest in various fields that include paralegal, auto repair and medical billing. Their average wage: $9.18 an hour.

Preparing displaced workers for higher-paying positions has long been an elusive goal of job-retraining programs. Studies cited in an April report by the U.S. Labor Department suggest a fundamental obstacle: Short-term skills training of three to six months, the studies found, is unsuccessful in producing strong earnings.

Yet few laid-off workers commit to long-term training or education, such as two-year college degrees, because they simply cannot afford to: Their unemployment benefits run out after six months.

The Clinton Administration recently proposed a bill, the Re-employment Act, that would extend financial aid beyond six months for people pursuing long-term training. The proposal would also consolidate the many federal programs for dislocated workers into one-stop centers for training information and services.

Deborah Sanchez, manager of the retraining program for Santa Ana, said some changes have been made already that might help propel the unemployed into higher-paying jobs.

Since June, 1993, Sanchez’s office has used some of its funding to help about 50 workers obtain high school equivalency certificates. Also, Sanchez said, some displaced workers have won approval to enlist in training programs that run longer than 12 months, which was previously not allowed.

One of those who has benefited from those changes is Michael Woodley, 35. Sanchez’s office paid $9,000 in tuition and fees so that he could attend an 18-month program at Newbridge College in Tustin that will prepare him to be a surgical technician or a physician’s aide in an operating room.

Until he was laid off in 1991, Woodley worked on the rear-end assembly of the McDonnell Douglas C-17 jet at $15.65 an hour. Today, he is poring over thick books on such subjects as anatomy, physiology and medical instrumentation. Woodley, who had two years of college earlier, now hopes eventually to become a physician.

“The layoff is probably the best thing that’s happened to me,” he said. “I feel a lot better about myself now. This program has given me a lot of self-confidence.”

Woodley stands a good chance of finding work as a surgical technician as soon as he completes his training next summer, analysts say, because demand for such skilled employees is strong. But not all workers entering new fields can count on immediate success in an uncertain economy.

Julie Ezell, 49, completed paralegal training at MTI College in Orange in February. For six months, Ezell said, she studied three hours a night: “It was intense.” Since then, the laid-off accounts payable worker has sent more than 200 resumes and gone to 20 interviews but has yet to land a job.

One reason Ezell chose paralegal training, she said, is that nationwide occupational studies have projected strong job growth in the field. “By 2000, paralegals are supposed to be the No. 1 profession,” she said.

Perhaps, but in Orange County, a new study to be released later this month projects that between 1992 and 1998 the paralegal job market here will grow by just 30 jobs, to a total of 890.

Paralegal positions “were very promising, but it became a trendy type of occupation and everyone jumped into it,” said Mercedes Haag, the county’s research analyst who conducted the study. In addition, she said, lawyers who are struggling for work themselves are not hiring aides.

Yet a steady stream of students is entering MTI’s paralegal training class, the school says.

“The hardest part of this whole scenario is to identify where the jobs are going to be,” said David Edenhofer, personnel manager at Farmers Insurance’s office in Santa Ana and chairman of that city’s council that oversees federal training programs. “I’m not sure how you find that out.”

Some programs aimed at placing people in high-tech jobs have been successful, though most trainees have needed longer than three months to find work.

For example, federal retraining funds enabled 23 former aerospace workers, most of them from Orange County, to enroll in a six-month training program at Cal State Long Beach to become environmental engineers. The pilot class graduated in October. Though only seven had full-time jobs by last year’s end, all but one of the rest have since found work in their chosen field, said C.V. Chelapati, a professor of civil engineering who directs the program.

One of the first seven to find a job was Bert Williams, a 37-year-old civil engineer who was laid off in February, 1993, from Rogerson Aircraft Corp. in Irvine. Two weeks later, while glumly watching television at his Lake Forest home, Williams saw a notice about the Cal State Long Beach environmental engineering program. He called the Santa Ana employment office to apply for the training and was accepted.

The classwork at Cal State consisted of 400 hours that included basic chemistry, water quality, probability and computer applications. Williams, who has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Seattle University, said he put in another 400 hours of study on his own while working part-time selling men’s sportswear at a Broadway department store.

On completing his course work, Williams took an unpaid internship at the city of Santa Ana, and within two months had turned that into a full-time job as an engineer in the city’s landfill section. Williams is now earning $40,000 a year, about what he made in his last aerospace job.

“Without the retraining, I probably would have pounded the pavement,” said Williams, who credits his placement success to Mark Matthews and Robert Bendel, two Santa Ana counselors who encouraged and guided him. “Things for me look fairly good. I feel really fortunate.”

Center Locations

Federally funded retraining programs for dislocated workers operate out of three employment service offices in Orange County.

* Anaheim Job Training Program (for Anaheim residents): 201 S. Anaheim Blvd., second floor. (714) 254-4350

* Private Industry Council-Santa Ana (for Santa Ana residents): 410 W. 4th St. (714) 647-6545

* Orange County Special Programs Office, Santa Ana (for all other Orange County residents): 1300 S. Grand Ave., Building B. (714) 567-7530

Source: Individual centers

Researched by DON LEE / Los Angeles Times