Techies embark on journey out of 'black ice of life': Laid-off workers find happiness beyond the tech rainbow

The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Page: D1 / FRONT
Section: City
Byline: Juliet O'Neill
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
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Brent Watson is as proud now of carrying a big tool box as he used to be handing out his business card, embossed with a high-tech company title.

"I don't even carry a business card now," he boasts. Mr. Watson was transferred to Ottawa by Apple Computer in 1991, in the days when "you could raise $1 million on the back of a Starbucks napkin."

The 46-year-old now makes his living as a handyman.

Mr. Watson experienced "more famine than feast" as a high-tech business-development consultant; after being lured away from Apple, he was laid off from two companies, AIT and Vitana, when the tech bubble burst.

So he decided to offer his love of puttering, tinkering and renovating to a number of
property management companies. He was astonished to receive three positive replies. "The market looks very promising," he says.

Anita Pathak, an engineer who worked for a year and a half in hardware design at Mosaid, was laid off on Sept. 11, 2001. The bad news seemed minor as she drove home from Kanata with the radio reporting the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"I told myself 'Look, I'm going home, I still have a chance to do something. It's a small
thing. I can find another job. I can move on. I'm alive.'"

After two years of job searching, networking and volunteering, Ms. Pathak, too, has carved out a new career and plans to "take high tech as my hobby now."

She started a business, Shilp Inc., importing and selling jewelry, brass bookends and other gifts from India. Her first shipment sold out within a month, before Christmas. "I got an amazing response," she said. "So far, I'm pretty excited about it."

Mr. Watson and Ms. Pathak were among an array of laid-off technology workers and managers who spoke to the Citizen about their journey out of a sector in which too many people are competing for too few jobs.

It can be a difficult transition, and quite scary, but some of those who have done it report feelings of liberation and pride, even in cases of lower income and less prestige.

They all had help and support, some from government programs or career counsellors, some from spouses, family and friends.

That's the No. 1 lesson Mr. Watson says he learned: "Swallow your pride and learn to say 'yes' when others offer to help you." Church pastors and friends helped him survive what he calls "the black ice of life." Unemployment had been all the more shattering to him because his wife had sought a divorce at the same time.

Perry Pavlovic, now a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker, did everything under the sun during his 18 years at Nortel: hardware design, supply management, contract negotiating, human resources and project management. By the time he got laid off, after bracing for it for two years, "I was relieved it was over."

His free advice to those who want to stop banging their heads against a wall seeking tech jobs that don't exist: job hunt on unfamiliar territory; be open to different work, whether long term or short term; don't get hung up on pay scales; and network with lots of different people. As for your skills: "It's not what you did; it's how you did it."

Career counsellors and business coaches advise unemployed tech-sector workers to figure out what they would love to do, what their passion is for, and then aim for it. Instead of dwelling on positions they've held, they should list all the skills they've picked up.

Grant Mellow took a couple of months off to decompress after his layoff from Nortel, where he had worked for 18 years. He was senior manager, education and training, when he got his pink slip in July 2002. Like many tech managers during the boom years he had put in long hours on the job and, by the time the end came, the work he once loved had become very stressful. The sector had gone from developmental mode to survival mode.

"It wasn't fun. It was overwhelming."

He set out to "establish my vision -- what do I want to do?" He was good at educating and managing and wanted to do something that is helpful to people. And he loved cycling. He walked into a bicycle shop and snagged a job.

"It was great for me," he said in an interview at Francesco's, a coffee shop and coffee bean importing company started by another laid off technology worker. "It got me out and I learned about running a small business."

A year and a half later, Mr. Mellow's vision is about to become reality. He has bought a franchise in Action International Business Coaching, an Australian-based company with about 500 coaches around the world. He has been trained by the company, attends weekly online company meetings and is excited about putting his experience and skills to use helping small and medium-sized businesses improve operations. He doesn't have a client yet, but is confident he will soon.

While working at the bike shop, Mr. Mellow went to career counsellor Barb Booth, of Career Station, at the suggestion of a relative. "She asked lots of questions, tough questions," he recalled.

Ms. Booth flushed out his ideas of what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it and how he was going to go about it. "I knew what I was looking for but I didn't know where to find it," Mr. Mellow said.

A friend of his, Rick Spencer, had decided to buy an Action International franchise and Mr. Mellow saw it as a good fit for himself, too. "Rick has been a big support for me," he said.

"Many former high-tech employees have found life after high-tech," says Mark Wardrop, who spent 18 years in Ottawa's tech sector, at Nortel Networks and Visual Networks, and now owns and operates Ottawa Windows & Doors. "Ottawa
has a lot of opportunities for those willing to branch out and take some risks."

Mr. Wardrop's wife, Judy, and daughters, Lindsey, 15, and Kaitlyn, 12, have been supportive in his transition from a high-flying employee in a large corporation to a small businessman who's responsible for everything from payroll to plumbing. Their lifestyle was scaled down, but they realize "this is how most people live."

Reaching out for and accepting support offered by family, relatives, friends, peers and social networks was cited by every interviewee as a vital part of surviving a period of unemployment and making a career transition.

Mr. Wardrop, 43, started after graduation in 1983 at Bell Northern Research in Winnipeg as a software programmer, and in Ottawa was promoted during his years at Nortel into management roles. But he missed out on a severance package
from Nortel because he moved to Visual Networks in 2000, a company that closed its doors less than a year later.

After two months in a fruitless technology job search, he decided "this is nuts" and set himself up as a business consultant. By March 2003, he had bought a bankrupt business and, with a staff of four, including a veteran salesman who specializes in windows and doors, brought it back to life. It took him nine months to break even.

For a while, what Mr. Wardrop missed the most from the tech sector was the adrenaline rush of meeting deadlines on new products. What he misses now is extensive company-paid travel. "I went through some depression when I lost my
elite status with Aeroplan," he says, swearing he is not kidding.

"It takes guts to change," said Gerry Lalonde, 43, who worked in materials management in the information-technology sector for 20 years and now is on a learning curve as a car salesman at Mews Chev Olds. After his layoff from JDS
Uniphase in June 2002, he found a warehouse management job in Cornwall. But the commute to his family in Gatineau was too much.

Mr. Lalonde reached a point where the first two words in his head when he woke up each morning were "Aw, shit." Every time a tech job came up, "I would think of the 400 Nortel people with skills like me looking for that one job." He decided it was time to broaden his horizons.

Mr. Lalonde got professional, low-cost help at Career Station, a non-profit career counselling service. Barb Booth, an award-winning former public servant, gave him one-on-one training in the art of tailoring his resume to the job opening and showed him that his work skills are extensive and transferable to other sectors.

Mr. Lalonde discovered he's a more flexible person than he thought he was. "There's a lot more out there than tech," he said.

Mr. Lalonde picked Career Station from a list of career counselling services listed in the phone book. He called three or four and the people at Career Station sounded the nicest on the phone, plus they offered affordable personal coaching. For $49, clients get personal job-search and career-makeover services for three months and more if necessary.

While Mr. Lalonde was pleased with the assistance he got, Cheryl Gorman, executive director of Talentworks, says that unemployed people who need help should have a better way of finding it than such a shot-in-the-dark method as picking a name from the phone book. Talentworks, a program of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Information, is involved in an attempt to ease the difficulties of unemployed techies.

Ms. Gorman said an effort is under way to link eight large peer networks that have sprung up to support job seekers from the tech sector. "The people they want to work with, such as employers and career service providers, can't handle dealing with them all individually," she said. "We felt it would be more effective if we went forward as one group."

The plan is to provide a single source of streamlined information about job opportunities inside and outside the tech sector and career-guidance services available in Ottawa. Employers will be involved, as well, with the aim of matching
jobs and workers, she said.

"For some of them it will be staying in the sector, because there are jobs in the sector. For some of them it's moving sectors, but they're struggling with how to do that move. They have a hard time finding information about how to
transition to another sector," she said. "One of the things we can do as a community is to enable large groups of people to make that transition more effectively, so they don't have to struggle one by one to figure out 'Who do I need to talk to, what are the steps I need to take, what sectors might I transition to?'"

Mr. Watson said he was willing to tell his story, including his needless fear that his children would think less of him as a handyman, if it helped one unemployed person.

"Build a safety net and be willing to take a lower position to get started," he advises. "Work is healthy and the title on the business card does not matter."

The self-employment benefit program of Human Resources Development Canada helped him realize that the skills he had from tech work experience and his hobby of building decks, renovating basements and fixing things could be the basis of a property maintenance business.

The program provides a small income and free coaching on how to establish a small business from experts at the YMCA-YWCA Enterprise Centre. Ms. Pathak also launched her business with coaching from the Y on everything from marketing to business registration, taxation and accounting.

The centre is currently accepting about 50 self-employment applicants every three months and can take more if they are deemed viable business propositions. The centre gets hundreds of applications each year from people recommended by Northern Lights, an HRDC-financed job service.

Unemployed tech workers, including 50-year-old Cornelie Dinkel, have taken jobs that are much more humble than their tech work, and still search for jobs in their field in their spare time. "It's not a career choice," she said of her job at the Swiss Pastries deli counter at Billings Bridge.

"I do it to put food on the table."

Ms. Dinkel was laid off two years ago from an engineering-support contract at the wireless division of Nortel. At the deli, she earns less than half her former pay but she is not, as some people she knows, spending all her savings or living on credit.

"It's a good idea to work for self-esteem and for the paycheque, even if it's a small paycheque."