Washington: When Joe Burklund of Des Moines, Iowa, lost his job at the depths of recession in 2009 after 30 years in the advertising and marketing industry, he never imagined another career.

He was almost 60 and optimistic he would land another job in his field, where he was earning $65,000 (Dh238,745) a year.

After collecting unemployment checks for a year, Burklund took a part-time job at grocery chain Trader Joe’s. As he watched his retirement savings bleed almost dry, he realised his situation would not turn around anytime soon.

An acquaintance suggested he train for call centre work, servicing banks and insurance companies.

“I said, ‘Well, I may as well try that because nothing else seems to be working’,” Burklund told Reuters.

Thousands of Americans aged 55 and older are going back to school and reinventing themselves to get an edge in a difficult labour market, hoping to rebuild retirement nest eggs that were almost destroyed by the recession.

“I went into it thinking ‘I am not too sure I am cut out for call centre work,’ and I never really wanted to sell insurance. But I was willing to try anything to gain full employment,” said Burklund, who has set aside hopes to retire at 65.

Within two weeks of completing the programme, he had three interviews and two job offers. In March, he started working at Marsh Insurance.

A similar tale is recounted by Tom Halseth, about 610km east in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Halseth, 60, lost his job in May 2010 after 30 years as store manager with retail chain JC Penny. He spent 16 months unemployed.

Today, Halseth is a quality assurance technician with dried fruit packer Mariani Packing Company in Wisconsin Rapids. He landed the job after a rigorous five-month programme that included biology, chemistry and math classes and a two-week internship.

According to the Federal Reserve, household financial assets, which exclude homes, dropped from a peak of $57 trillion in the third quarter of 2007 to just over $49 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, the latest period for which data is available.

A survey to be released this summer by the Public Policy Institute of AARP, an advocacy group for older Americans, found a quarter of Americans 50 years and older used up all their savings during the 2007-09 recession. About 43 per cent of the 5,000 respondents who took part in the survey said their savings had not recovered.

Too young to retire

Many older workers who lost jobs during the downturn are too young to retire and usually would not be considered ideal for retraining.

Independent groups like the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, which is working with local communities and businesses to build skills and careers for workers and job seekers, are working to debunk that myth.

In the last four years, the Fund has helped about 1,860 Americans 55 years and older retrain for new jobs.

According to data from the Labour Department, 2.65 million people participated in its Workforce Investment Act programmes in 2011. Those programmes, which are also designed to help people find jobs, are separate from those run by independent groups like the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

About 345,000, or 13 per cent of participants in the Workforce Investment Act programmes, were 55 years and older.

“If they have a 20-year record of being a great worker, companies will take them,” said Fred Dedrick, executive director at the National Fund.

He said the fund, which worked with the academy in Iowa that trained Burklund and with the Mid-State Technical College in Wisconsin, where Halseth received his food manufacturing science certificate, has a 60-70 per cent success rate in finding jobs for graduates.

“It also depends on the labour market. If you have an unemployment rate of 4 or 5 per cent they will take them,” Dedrick said.

“But if you have a high unemployment rate of say 10 per cent, and you have the choice of investing in somebody who is 50 or somebody who is 30, of course you will invest in the younger worker because they will be around longer.”

The unemployment rate for workers 55 years and older edged up to 6.3 per cent in April from 6.2 per cent in March. This age group accounted for 16 per cent of the 12.5 million unemployed Americans last month.

While the jobless rate for older Americans is much lower than the 8.1 per cent national rate, it is double what it was when the recession started in December 2007, a statistic with which people like Paulette Gordon, 59, are all too familiar.

Gordon, from Houston, Texas, lost her job as a technical analyst for energy companies two years ago after three decades structuring acquisitions of oil and gas wells.

She brushed up her resume to include administration skills. So far that has not yielded anything and last month she sold her jewellery to pay rent.

“I am surviving by the grace of God,” Gordon said.