Program Helps Ex-Defense Workers Re-Engineer Careers

Mehran Sajjadi designed and built his own car. He oversaw the construction of a six-mile, four-lane highway in Utah. He talks with pride about designing devices used in building the space shuttle and crafting components for jet engines.

But after 15 years in various aerospace and manufacturing industries, the Irvine engineer almost overnight joined Southern California’s swelling ranks of unemployed defense workers.

“I’ve gone through hell,” said Sajjadi, 44, who was laid off from his last engineering job in 1992. “But what the economy does is out of our control.”

After fruitlessly mailing resumes while working in unrelated jobs, Sajjadi is making a new start. Through an ad he spied on an unemployment office wall, Sajjadi found Project INTENT, a Cal State Fullerton program that retrains laid-off engineers and technicians who were left behind by the region’s shrinking defense industry.

“It’s given me a new hope,” said Sajjadi, a civil engineer who also has worked as a mechanical and manufacturing engineer. “If it does nothing else, it gives us self-confidence.”

About 20 men and women are taking this year’s six-month series of courses at Cal State Fullerton, which is designed to adapt defense workers’ skills to modern fields of commercial manufacturing and environmental engineering. Program administrators then try to place students in internships.

The three-year, $1.1-million Project INTENT--Integrated Environmental Training Program for Defense Industry Engineers--is part of the federal defense-conversion initiative introduced two years ago as a crucial effort to use and sustain defense technology after the Cold War.

Current funds for Cal State Fullerton’s program are safe, but future money for the coalition of defense-conversion projects, called the Technology Reinvestment Program, is in doubt.

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted in February to pull $425 million for the program, which provides grants for Cal State Fullerton and other agencies nationwide. However, a Senate committee is considering diminishing the amount of that cut.

At Cal State Fullerton last year, 26 laid-off defense workers progressed through the first series of classes, said project coordinator Barry Gilbert, an engineer laid off from Rockwell Corp. in Anaheim. Thirteen of them were placed in internships, and half a dozen got permanent jobs.

“The rest are still looking,” Gilbert said. Graduates may use a campus resource center, computers and fax machines to send out resumes and prepare job materials, he said.

Ronald Seko of Fontana said he joined the program to gain a broad knowledge of environmental issues so he can heighten his chances of getting hired in a related field.

Seko, a 49-year-old electronics specialist, was laid off after 15 years at General Dynamics Corp. in Rancho Cucamonga. He tried his hand at real estate appraisal but could not get enough work to keep him afloat, he said. He sold his homes and investments, he said, and has been “milking credit cards” in recent years.

Companies “don’t want you when you’re 50,” Seko said. “I’ve tried to maintain a positive mental attitude, though.”