THE HUGHES CUTBACKS : The Real Job Will Be How to Find Work : Layoffs: Learning new skills and lowering pay expectations are necessary, employment specialists warn.
Employment specialists say that defense workers like the 4,400 soon to be laid off by Hughes Aircraft Co. face a tough time in today’s job market.
The high wages, generous benefit packages and highly specialized jobs that made aerospace work a career choice for many now makes those workers difficult to remove from the unemployment line, the employment specialists say.
Sounds like a pretty harsh judgment, but even aerospace employers admit that it’s true: Daniel J. Frownfelter, director of Hughes Aircraft Co.’s defense conversion adjustment program, said the average time between jobs for a newly laid-off aerospace worker in Southern California is 15 months. That compares to six months for most others.
To help the Hughes employees to be laid off in Southern California over the next 16 months--800 to 1,000 of them expected to be Fullerton employees--the company has set up retraining and employment centers using a $6-million federal grant and $1.7 million in state funds.
But finding them jobs won’t be easy: Many will have to learn new skills and most will have to dramatically cut back their pay and benefit expectations. They will be guided to careers in transportation and warehousing, international trade, telecommunications and health care, job specialists say.
“It really is difficult for many of them to make the transition,” said Jane O’Grady, administrator of the Job Training Partnership Act program in Orange County. Attitudes and acceptance of the way things are can be really important to successful job hunting, she said.
“I know that several times when we have helped (former aerospace) people find jobs for $40,000 a year, we’ve found that they were holding out for $60,000. They don’t see that sometimes you have to step down to step up.”
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Jacquie St. James is finding out the hard way. St. James, who was a production control administrator at Hughes’ Fullerton campus, was laid off in May. She said she’s been rejected so many times since then that she despairs for the Hughes workers expected to be laid off in Fullerton.
Her aerospace credentials are heavy baggage in interviews, St. James said, seemingly outweighing her college degree in business and six years in a Hughes management program.
At one major corporation in Brea, where she lives, St. James said she was told by a prospective employer that he had “seen people from Hughes at the store in the middle of the work day and wondered if there’s any work ethic there. People think there is a lot of fluff in the aerospace industry, and they don’t want to take a chance on hiring you.”
One thing that will help, suggested Costa Mesa job skills trainer Anthony Burnham, is to learn how to market achievement instead of experience.
“We have had a few aerospace people come through our program, and they have been very bright, very technically aware, people with a lot of seniority,” said Burnham, whose Pro-Active Institute trains people in how to re-enter and compete in the job market. “But they don’t really know much about what’s required to market themselves in today’s workplace.”
Employers, he said, aren’t hiring people who talk of their years of loyal service. “They’re hiring skills and results, not loyalty,” he said. “So you need to learn how to quantify, so you can sit down and tell an interviewer in dollars earned and percentages gained and hours saved just what it was that you achieved in your previous job.”
For its own workers, who are scheduled to start receiving layoff notices in six weeks, Hughes intends to conduct an intense retraining program, said program director Frownfelter.
Each laid-off worker will receive eight weeks’ notice, and during that time there will be an extensive effort to find another job with the General Motors Hughes Electronics group of businesses, he said. If that doesn’t work, or if an employee rejects another job with the company because he or she doesn’t want to relocate or to do that kind of work, then the company’s retraining program kicks in.
To encourage job hunting, he said, Hughes has designed its severance package so that laid-off employees who don’t actively pursue new jobs will lose their severance pay.
Laid-off employees also will be encouraged to seek outside employment during the eight-week period between their notice and their termination date, Frownfelter said. Job centers equipped with telephones, fax machines, employer guides and other tools needed to help with outside job searches are being set up.
Those same centers will operate as headquarters for retraining programs for Hughes employees who don’t find jobs within the company. The centers will be at the Fullerton plant, in Rancho Cucamonga and in Carlsbad.
The retraining programs are administered by a Los Angeles-based company called Defcon and are offered through a variety of public and private schools. Hughes will pay the first $1,000 in training costs, Frownfelter said. Government funds will cover the remainder.
