EMPLOYMENT: Area workers struggle with job market realities.

Kathi Frazier spends her Thursday mornings swapping stories and advice with other highly skilled professionals about how to overcome the challenges in the job market. Frazier, a former human resources manager who has been out of work since June 2010, is a member of the Canoga Park-West Hills WorkSource Center’s Experience Unlimited club, a group comprised of highly-skilled professionals who are out of work. The job market is new territory for many people who had previously been in their jobs for decades, said Eddie Purtuas, manager of the center. Job seekers today must adjust their tactics and expectations to meet new realities. Even workers such as Frazier, who was in her last job for four and a half years, find that re-entering the job market is difficult. “Looking for a job is not the way it used to be,” Frazier, 55, said. “You used to go out and get the paper, look in the want ads, mail out your resume. If you knew a company that you wanted to go to, you would physically go to that company. Now you’re just sitting at home with the TV on surfing the Internet for jobs.” She said many companies don’t call back about jobs. If they do, they usually have an aggressive screening process with clerical assistants asking a series of questions that determine whether an applicant gets an interview. Area workforce development officials say workers often have to get new skills training, search for jobs of lower status or pay, change fields or leave the area for work. They also say employers are still hesitant to rehire, as they continue gauging the economic climate. Meanwhile, highly skilled workers in the San Fernando Valley region are continuing to lose their jobs as large employers trim back their workforces. This year, for example, nearly 1,000 people lost their jobs as a result of layoffs at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman, Disney and Advanced Bionics. In one of the more recent layoffs, pre-packaged sushi maker Okami Inc., based in Sun Valley, recently started shutting down its local facility after it was acquired in April by Fuji Food Products Inc., another company that makes pre-packaged sushi and other food items. Okami cut 223 local employees, according to the California Employee Development Department’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN). The positions included executive, managerial and lower-level positions. Fuji Food Products decided to close Okami’s Sun Valley operations and consolidate them with its San Fe Springs plant, said Joe Marchica, president of Fuji Food Products. Purtuas said replacing lost jobs can be particularly challenging for older, more established professionals. They have to adjust to new ways of looking for work, such as searching and applying for jobs over the Internet and using keywords on resumes that will make it past scanning software. “It’s like learning to walk all over again in the job hunting market,” he said. “They’re not going to be at the same salary levels that they came from.” Frazier said when she started her search she was only looking for another human resources job. After awhile, she started considering other career options, including teaching abroad. “I need to reinvent myself because I may not be able to get back into that field,” said Frazier, who has been in the human resources industry for more than 10 years. “I’m pretty much looking at any industry that is willing to look at my skill set and realize that I’m the right person for the job.” Philip Klein, another member of the Canoga Park-West Hills WorkSource Center’s group and a certified public accountant, said he notices most employers are now seeking accountants with more specialized experience, such as those who have worked extensively with Securities and Exchange Commission reports. “If you don’t fit in their pigeon hole, you don’t get the job,” Klein said. He’s recently signed up for a three-day course by the American Institute of CPAs to help brush up on some of those specialty skills. In the interim, Klein said he is applying for lower-level accounting jobs. Center Visits Increase Jewish Vocational Services of Los Angeles, or JVS, operates three WorkSource centers in the greater Los Angeles area, including one in the Antelope Valley. The center’s visitor volume increased by about 20 percent from 2008 to 2010 and is maintaining that growth in 2011, said Angie Cooper, JVS’ director of workforce development. Cooper said the WorkSource centers have had more activity over the past year with higher wage professionals, who mostly have been unemployed for long periods of time. “Now what’s we’re seeing is some folks making over $80,000 (to) $100,000 a year walking into our centers,” she said. “Perhaps these people had been laid off and they didn’t reach out for any kind of assistance. Now after two years (of being unemployed), we’re seeing these people come into the center because they’re realizing they need some help.” Venise Jones, director for the Canoga Park-West Hills WorkSource Center, said her center had about 600 to 700 more visits in July this year than it did in July 2010. “We saw a significant uptick in new visitors to the center (in July),” Jones said, noting that July was the first month of the center’s new fiscal year. “We probably saw 600 to 700 more during that month.” That’s likely because of the uptick in company layoffs she’s seen occurring throughout the San Fernando Valley this year, she said. Jones noted that her center particularly receives a higher volume of highly skilled workers compared to others in the city. To help transition laid-off employees, she and her team have made visits to companies such as Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman to inform laid-off workers of their unemployment insurance rights and the center’s services. The WorkSource center also reached out to former employees from some of the most recent major layoffs and informed them about a job fair held at California State University, Northridge in late July. The fair featured jobs that corresponded with the recently laid-off employees’ skill sets, Jones said. The WorkSource Center and the Valley Economic Alliance are also waiting for the city to secure National Emergency Grants funds that can be used locally to provide training for displaced workers. Jones said the center was able to use the funds from the grant program last year to help people who were laid off in the mortgage and finance industries. Don Nakomoto, executive director of the Verdugo Workforce Investment Board, said the Verdugo Job Center in Glendale has much lower monthly visit volumes compared to a couple of years ago. His center, which mainly serves middle- to lower-position workers, has also seen fewer major layoffs by companies in its immediate area. However, he says worker woes are far from over as employers are still hesitant to hire, even if they’re seeing higher profits. “I think they’re waiting for a clear sign that there won’t be a recession around the corner and that business will improve,” he said. “At that point, I think we’ll some more impact in terms of hiring.”