m The Jobs They Are A-Changin

A large fraction of displaced workers who have found new jobs have had to switch careers, and most of those career-changers have downgraded to a lower-paying job, according to a new report from Rutgers’s Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

The report, which I wrote about in this weekend’s paper, reveals survey results of a group of American workers who were unemployed as of August 2009 and periodically re-interviewed about their job status. As of November 2010, only about a third of these original workers had found replacement jobs, either as full-time workers (26 percent) or as part-time workers who do not want a full-time job (8 percent). Of those workers who found jobs, more than 4 in 10 — 41 percent — said  they took a job in a “new field or career.”
The fact that so many of those who have found new work are changing careers may lend credence to the idea that people are taking advantage of training programs to move into a promising new career. But most of those entering new careers had not taken a class or training course for skills (even if the portion of career-changers who’d had retraining was higher than the portion of non-career-changers). The new-fielders were also more likely to take a hit in pay and a reduction in fringe benefits than those who managed to find re-employment in their existing career.
Source: Heldrich Center on Workforce Development

• It seems, then, that many who changed careers did so out of desperation: They probably saw no possible opportunities in their previous line of work. These types of structural shifts are common in the aftermath of recessions, as employers use a downturn to restructure their workforces and make them more efficient.
  
  In many ways, though, the new-fielders and the same-fielders among the re-employed have much in common. As you can see in the chart above, about the same share of both groups had found their new jobs by re-locating or by first finding temporary employment. The two groups are also nearly identical with regard to demographic composition, including age, gender, household income, racial/ethnic background and educational attainment.
  
  Additionally, according to an analysis by Cliff Zukin (one of the study’s authors), for both groups:
  
      * More than half report that they are generally satisfied with their new jobs.
      * About half say they are not very or not at all concerned with the security of that job.More than half looked for their current job for at least seven months before finding it.
• Respondents were split over where they think this new job will take them: half say they’re now doing something they really want to do and think it is a new long- term job, and the other half are using it to get by while they look for something better.