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The economy seems to be improving at about the rate it takes to paint the Brooklyn Bridge. In the meantime, people who have been laid off or who worked for a business that went bust, job haters and the underemployed have all been through my door in the last year. I thought I would give you a sense of how several people on the Hill are coping to give you a few new options. I have disguised the stories just enough to protect confidentiality.

Mary worked for a small healthcare consulting firm that ran into trouble when its major government contract was not renewed. With two weeks severance she was laid off in March. She poked around on her own for 60 days before she called for help. After completing some assessments, Mary discovered that she was really more interested in providing social services to children than health care policy. She had loved being a camp counselor and she had been a Big Sister during college She was still in touch with several of the young women she had mentored.

Health care policy was something that her M.D. father had suggested would be “hot” and so she spent time getting a graduate degree that she was reluctant to abandon. After our discussion, Mary went on a set of informational interviews and within two months found an opening at the Clinical Center at The National Institutes for Health (NIH) working with children and families who were engaged in experimental protocols. I asked Mary for words of wisdom to pass along to other job seekers.

“First get started fast. I kind of indulged the shock of the layoff and wasted about 30 days feeling sorry and mad,” she said. “It really helps to have a very specific interest in mind so you can be referred to the right people. I was at the NIH on an informational interview and I didn’t expect them to offer me a job. I just contacted them because someone at my church had a friend who worked there and it sounded interesting.  But the woman I was talking to there was also a refugee from health policy, and she said that she much preferred providing hands-on service to real people. The interview felt so natural that I knew I would like to work there.”

George had an MBA from Indiana University and was working as a senior financial analyst at the Navy Yard. He opened our first meeting last year by saying “ I have crunched numbers since I was in high school and all of a sudden I am bored to tears. If I have to go through one more budget cycle, I am going to tear out the few hairs I have left. But I don’t know what I would like to do.” I asked him to complete several assessments and it turned out that George had a long abandoned fantasy about starting his own business. When we looked specifically at the kind of business that interested him, he said the “fitness field”. His mother had been a star gymnast in college and George had always been a Grade A gym rat. After our initial meetings, George spent evenings and weekends interviewing the owners of a wide variety of fitness venues including Curves, Results, Washington Sports Club, and Gold’s gym.

George decided that a new service offering, one-on-one personal training at people’s homes was likely to be successful. The Pilates and hand weight equipment that George used was portable and he bought a second hand van and his company “Health Your Way” was born. George followed the advice in the business plan on the Small Business Administration website, advertised in northwest DC churches, coffee shops and local newspapers and before long he had his first few customers. Last time I checked with him he was beginning to get the number of referrals from his current clients that promised increasingly profitable results. George said, “I have never been more satisfied. It is so scary to walk away from a regular paycheck and my friends thought I was nuts to resign from the Feds, but I just couldn’t see putting in another ten years. I am so glad I had the guts to act on my hunches.”

Jennifer had been devastated by the recent death of her father. Coming on the heels of ending her job as a political appointee in the Bush administration, it had been a tough year. She still had not decided what to do for a job when I saw her last month and she was starting to feel nervous about the rate that she was spending her savings. I discovered that Jennifer had had an eclectic career following her military husband around the world and she loved to start new organizations. As the base commander’s wife in several posts she had been expected to play a major role in maintaining the morale of the families. She had always found a niche that was missing in family care and created an interested group of volunteers to launch a new and valuable service.

As she thought about her future, the usual advice from recruiters about “understand your strengths and study the company that you are targeting” seemed reasonable but not clarifying. When I asked Jennifer what she cared about now, she surprised herself by telling me that she had become fascinated with Bosnia. An intelligent and compassionate young Bosnian woman had been her father’s caretaker at the end of his life and the family had become interested in helping her to become a permanent resident. Jennifer identified with the plucky young woman as she remembered her own experience of taking college courses at night for eight years while she worked full-time during the day. The more she looked into the issues facing women and children in Bosnia, the more committed she was becoming to providing some sort of educational or social services to them. The last time I checked in with her she had seen a number of government officials at the State Department, AID, and the Pentagon as well as several non-profits large and small serving eastern Europe. With each visit her vision is becoming clearer and she expects to create a job for herself as a liaison between several service groups within the next month.