Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301260419
SECTION: NEW RIVER VALLEY ECONOMY PAGE: 36 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
ECONOMY SENDS MANY BACK TO SCHOOL
Like many people who have worked in factories and industrial plants over the past decades, Jim Irby thought his job at Pulaski County's Burlington Industries was for life.But when the plant closed in 1988, he found himself armed with an unemployment check and some retraining money from the federal Trade Readjustment Act.
He went to school at Virginia Tech in a program designed in the 1970s that counts some technical work toward a degree.
The program, known as Vocational Two+Two, is only one of the things that area colleges have set up over the past two decades to help workers as the economy shifts and changes.
Burlington told Irby about the program, known as V-22. Students go back into vocational education, earn a two-year degree at a community college, and finish up the last two years at Tech.
Irby walked out with a bachelor of science degree.
"I was kind of excited," recalls Irby, 42, now a drafting instructor at Blacksburg High School. "I had always meant to go back after my associate degree."
Other students are more fearful when they go back into the classroom.
And many of them had thought they would keep their jobs forever.
"That's what our fathers and grandfathers had told us," said Bob Thomson, head of Tech's management development center. Thomson had worked in industry at Fortune 500 companies and as a consultant. He has watched the downsizing that is taking place not just locally, but nationwide.
"My generation was told that when you join a company, you work hard and you stay with that company. You don't part until it's time to retire," said Thomson, who is in his 50s.
Thomson's father, for instance, worked at the same insurance company for 49 years.
"But that's not what we're passing on to our kids,' he said.
By the time displaced workers head into retraining, some are mentally prepared for it. Others still are looking back at the company, saying: "Why me? Why did I fail?"
That is especially true, Thompson said, if the plant doesn't close completely and certain workers are targeted for layoffs.
In the past, plants used to retrain workers for other positions - a shift from drafting to engineering perhaps. But as plants downsize, other positions no longer exist.
School and retraining become more viable options than searching for another factory job.
When Irby returned to school at 38, being outnumbered by younger students didn't bother him.
He asked questions in class, did his homework and did not become a part of "the party life" that many of his classmates seemed to have.
In the end, he had the highest grade-point average in the College of Education. He has a certificate at home to prove it.
Older students are becoming more common as the population ages and more people need retraining, said Kurt Eschenmann, an associate professor of vocational education. "A student might be 18 years old or he might be 43."
The V-22 program was started in 1978 to give displaced workers an educational option and give credit for technical skills learned on the job.
As the years have gone on, the program has grown. Soon, home economics will be added to the choice of teaching options.
The program works like this: Students go to a community college and earn an associate degree. If they receive at least a 2.5 grade-point average and have three letters of recommendation from people familiar with their work, they interview with Tech. If that's successful, they are admitted as juniors.
They take courses in the College of Education, and when they graduate, their associate degree in, say, drafting and design, becomes their major.
Students specialize in industrial, marketing or business education or in health occupations education.
"The target is to have a program for students who, out of high school, don't want to go straight to a four-year institution," Eschenmann said.
"The second target is to let a student who has been at, maybe AT&T, and picked up an associate degree finish up here."
The program has about 35 graduates a year, Eschenmann said.
Irby, who once had thought fleetingly of teaching as a career, says he's happy in the job he started when he graduated in 1989. He likes the students and he likes the summers off.
But he's still trying to get used to some things.
In his college courses, he had to take basic algebra, though he had been doing higher math in industry for years.
He has to slow down for the students, because they don't have the same background as his own co-workers.
He doesn't have the sense of security he had before he lost his job at Burlington. And his salary is a little lower than in his engineering days.
But he has a job.
Eschenmann said many of the students who graduate from the program get job offers - as teachers in secondary schools or community colleges or as training specialists in business and industry.
But not all are willing to relocate and accept those positions. As with other jobs in the area, teaching positions have declined with the economy. People at the plants move away, and they take their children, would-be students, along with them.