With millions of jobs likely gone for good, the pandemic is forcing unemployed Chicagoans to rethink their careers.
With millions of jobs lost amid pandemic, unemployed Chicagoans are rethinking careers
Aformer Gap manager loses his job of nearly 20 years and becomes a welder. A ● restaurant server loses hers and starts working at a cannabis dispensary. A personal ● trainer, who once worked in finance, starts looking for a role in supply chain management. Across Chicago, the job market is tight as the ongoing health crisis ● continues to batter parts of the U.S. economy, forcing workers in some of the hardest-hit industries to switch careers. Some are learning new skills through certification programs at local colleges while others turn to workforce development programs in hopes of landing a job.
Angelique Nieves, 24, of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, decided not to apply to any restaurants after losing her job as a breakfast server at a hotel last spring. Instead, she looked for a job at a marijuana dispensary, hoping to join a growing industry.
But after not getting any callbacks, she enrolled in a 16-week program at Olive-Harvey College to earn a certification in cannabis dispensary operations and management. Last month, she started at Chicagobased
Cresco Labs, which operates the Sunnyside dispensary brand, as a community integration coordinator.
“Before the pandemic hit, I had this mentality that restaurants will always be there, but the pandemic has shown me that restaurants will not always be there,” Nieves said. “What will always be there is medicine,
whether it’s cannabis or something else.”
Two-thirds of unemployed Americans have seriously considered changing their occupation since losing their jobs, according to a mid-January survey of more than 10,000 adults by the Pew Research Center. And a third of the jobless said they have taken steps to pick up new skills through job training programs or educational opportunities.
The Jane Addams Resource Corp., which provides job training and placement services, has seen an 80% increase in participants in the past year. The nonprofit, in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood, helps lower-income and unemployed workers find jobs in welding, manufacturing and mechanical assembly.
One such worker is Joe Sousa, 39, whowas employed at The Gap for about 20 years before his store in Lombard closed in December 2019, a couple months before the pandemic began. Sousa said the company offered him a position at a different store, but he declined, as the retail clothing industry continues to struggle.
“I didn’t want to move up the corporate ladder in retail. I got nine months of severance, and I had all this time off that I could learn something new,” said Sousa, of Chicago’s Jefferson Park neighborhood.
In December, a month after completing the job training program at Jane Addams, Sousa landed a job as a welder at manufacturer S&C Electric Co. He earns about $17 an hour, and while it’s less than the roughly $23 an hour he was making as a store manager, Sousa said his future earnings potential is far greater.
Liz Czarnecki, director of training services at Jane Addams, said many people are joining retraining programs after being laid off
during the pandemic. During the fiscal year that ended in January 2020, the organization trained about 21 people per month. Now, it’s training about 38, she said.
Retraining programs may be key to getting many people back to work, as some jobs are likely gone for good.
A recent McKinsey Global Institute report estimates as many as 4.3 million customer and food service jobs in the U.S. might not return after the pandemic, while job growth is projected to increase in higher-wage professions like health care and technology.
The report predicts that as many as 17 million workers in the U.S. might need to change careers. The rise of automation and changes to business operations in the past year, like self checkout lines at stores and delivery services, might eliminate the need for some of those low-skilled jobs, and as a result, people are applying to job training programs, said Kweilin Ellingrud, an author of the report.
“Our jobs of the future are going to increasingly
need those technological skills, and social and emotional skills. They are going to need a lot, lot less physical and manual skills. … There will be a real shift and it will be reflected in the reskilling that is done at the state and federal level, but also by employers as well,” she said.
Job openings in the Chicago area were down 9.7% at the end of January from a year ago, according to the most recent data from job search site Indeed. But higher-wage postings in the finance and technology fields have continued to pick up, Indeed’s chief economist Jed Kolko said.
“Hiring is a bigger investment for them. They think not so much about how many people we need next week or next month, but rather how many people we need next year and the year after that. Their hiring patterns are more defined by where they expect demand to be longer term,” Kolko said.
Meanwhile, the pace of hiring in sectors hit hard during the pandemic, like leisure and hospitality, will depend on how fast the vaccine is distributed. In
Illinois, 4.48% of the population, or 571,260 people, has been fully vaccinated as of Monday.
Kolko said a wide vaccine distribution is needed for certain sectors that are concentrated in large cities to recover, such as hotels, arts and entertainment, business travel, and meetings and conventions.
“Those are the kinds of activities that can’t recover until the virus is behind us,” he said.
Last week, Chicago eased its indoor dining restriction, allowing bars and restaurants to offer service at either 40% capacity or 50 people, which ever is less. Last month, the city moved to phase four of the governor’s reopening plan, which allows cinemas, museums, retail and fitness clubs to open with capacity limits.
Nairobi Evans, 48, had been working as a personal trainer for six years when the state’s coronavirus restrictions on group fitness classes started to take a toll on his business. He said he previously worked in trading operations for 15 years and has a degree in economics from Northern Illinois
University, but faced challenges trying to get back into the finance industry.
“In a sense I’ve been penalized for being an entrepreneur for the past six years, especially in an industry that’s unrelated. It’s very difficult. I haven’t even got called in for an interview. It makes it difficult for me to latch on back into that industry,” Evans said.
Evans, who now trains a handful of fitness clients, said he is looking for jobs in supply chain and project management. He recently joined a nine-week job training program offered by the Chicago Urban League aimed at helping people of color get construction and energy jobs.
“I feel being part of this program gives me an opportunity to have inroads to a solid position somewhere and not be left scrambling with the millions of other people who are going to be searching for employment” when coronavirus restrictions lift, Evans said.
Still, not everyone is looking to switch careers. And the rise in remote work has increased the pool of applicants, making it much more competitive to apply for jobs, said Anita Jenke, executive director of Career Transitions Center of Chicago, a nonprofit career coaching organization.
As employers are inundated with hundreds of applications, networking has become that much more important to stand out from the crowd, Jenke said. Two key tools job seekers need now are LinkedIn and Zoom, she said.
“The meeting at the coffee shop isn’t happening. … I encourage people as much as possible to do the networking by Zoom in order to make that connection,” she said.
Abbott Laboratories, which has been on a hiring spree as it builds more of its rapid antigen COVID-19 testing devices, began moving its recruiting online about four years ago, a process that was accelerated by the pandemic. The company has about 1,000 open positions nationwide in research and development, finance, marketing and sales.
The north suburban medical device company developed an app that allows hiring managers to schedule interviews with job applicants and ask questions to determine the candidate’s skill set. Abbott has used its app to speed up the interview process, allowing the company to cut back on the time-consuming process of scheduling candidates for on-site visits.
“We as recruiters are faster now that we are using video interviewing. So hiring decisions are faster,” said Vildan Kehr, head of Abbott’s talent acquisition.
Kehr said the company has seen a 50% increase in job applications in the past year globally. Abbott posted earnings of $4.5 billion last year, an increase from $3.7 billion in 2019.
Demand in certain fields of the health care industry, including nurses, pharmacists, medical device-makers and long-term care facility workers, has been strong in the past year, piquing the interest of workers looking to switch careers, Kehr said.
Melissa Brennan, a senior scientist at Abbott who helps create diagnostics and blood testing devices, said she had no prior knowledge developing medical devices before joining the company five years ago. She worked at Argonne National Laboratory building sensors that detect possible bioterror attacks. Since health care is always evolving, Brennan said there are many opportunities for people to break into the industry.
“Sometimes you can be a little intimidated, but I think it’s important to not feel discouraged to go into a new industry,” Brennan said. “Your skill set can really translate more often than people think.”