Changing places

RETRAINING: There’s good news and bad news about the recession. The bad news is that people are losing their jobs. The good news is that many of those who still have jobs are learning new skills.

A number of American companies have cut jobs in order to stay in business. This often means that they have to do the same amount of work with fewer people. So employees who remain have to be more flexible, and they are taking on new tasks.

Lay Luangrath is one of those employees. Luangrath works for Hero Arts Inc. , a Californian company that makes rubber stamps. He used to deal with customer inquiries, but offered to work on the computer system as well in order to save the company money.

Recently, when there was a server problem, Luangrath repaired it himself instead of calling in consultants. He found advice about the problem on Google. “I could have failed and blown everything up,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “But it worked, and I was pretty proud of myself.”

"It could have failed, but it worked, and I was proud of myself," says Lay Luangrath.

According to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, 34 per cent of HR managers said that their companies had retrained employees for new jobs during the last six months. In October 2008, in a similar survey, only 10 per cent of HR managers said their companies were retraining employees.

Southwest Airlines is one example of a company making use of retraining opportunities. The airline has a policy of not laying off employees, which meant that, when the company announced a hiring freeze in January, it had to find other jobs for its recruiters. Eighty-two of them have now worked in almost every department, which has saved the company about $250,000.

Meanwhile, Lay Luangrath’s boss is pleased with his employee’s initiative. Hero Arts CEO Aaron Leventhal says Luangrath is saving the company up to $1,200 a week in tech-support fees.