That’s what Robin Shahan did. The San Ramon, Calif., computer programmer was laid off from Chevron in 1999 and SBC in 2004. In 2005, AT&T let her go when her contract ended. When she was still unemployed months later, Shahan began upgrading her skills. She reviewed a technical book for a friend, which landed her name on the back cover, and read more than 7,000 pages of technical material. She rewrote some of her old applications in the new technologies she’d studied. She posted answers to hundreds of questions on Internet message boards.
“It was like giving myself a pop quiz every day,” says Shahan, who danced around her living room when she was offered a job in March. Shahan was in a position to turn her unemployment into something positive and that helped ease her fears. But the isolation was challenging, she says.
“Prayer helps,” she says. “But if you let your thoughts get the best of you, you can wind yourself up pretty fast. After all, it is like the ultimate rejection, but most of the time it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” she said about a layoff.