Communicating with the engineer who becomes unemployed: A PSYCHOM ´72 paper

Recent cuts in the defense budget and slackening of the economy have created significant unemployment among engineers. This unprecedented major reversal in the job market has confronted many engineers with problems they have never before faced. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, starting in the spring of 1970, instituted a series of employment workshops to communicate the techniques, methods, and plan of attack to find jobs. These sessions achieved significant changes in attitude and motivation to help these engineers. This paper will present some observations, from these sessions, of the psychological blocks to logical thinking and how they can be overcome. Some specific case histories will be described and the results of a follow-up survey of the success of the participants of the Philadelphia workshops will be presented.