Lowering expectations

RECESSION: Glamorous, high-paying jobs were yesterday. Today, many workers just want a job — any job — that will pay the bills.

The recession has changed people’s expectations of working life. Some are retraining after losing jobs. Others are accepting lower pay and status in return for job security.

Dan Geneen, a former mill worker, lost his job at NewPage paper company in Kimberly, Wisconsin, last autumn. Now he is retraining to become a welder. Earlier, he qualified as a truck driver. “Looking online and in newspapers and talking to my instructors, I’ve decided that trucking and welding stand out as jobs that are available, and a lot of my friends agree,” Geneen told The New York Times.

More people are attending community colleges, which are less expensive than universities.

The need to retrain has benefited community colleges, which offer occupational training and are less expensive than universities. Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan, has seen its enrolment rise by 10 per cent over last year, says college president James Jacobs.

The college also needs new instructors to meet the increased demand. Most of these are adjuncts, who receive yearly salaries of $40,000 or less, and no benefits. Although many adjuncts dream of holding academic positions at prestigious universities, they have had to put such ambitious plans on hold, at least for the moment.

“If you spent six or seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting a graduate degree and you end up doing this, that is not a happy thought,” Jacobs says. “But it is steady work.”