With close to 1 million people still filing for first-time unemployment benefits every week, displaced workers in industries like travel, hospitality and entertainment are finding that they have to reorient their professional skills — and in some cases, their entire career trajectories — to keep making money during the pandemic. If this sounds like a drastic move, the workers making these changes say these are drastic times.
“This is a different kind of recession from the Great Recession,” said Maria Heidkamp, director of the New Start Career Network at Rutgers University. “We’re seeing a lot of older people who are dropping out of the labor market, and women who are facing child care issues. We don’t have a precedent for this,” she said.