Frank J. Kelly would like you to think of him as a lion tamer, but not the kind that travels with a circus. "I can tame the technology beast,'' said Kelly, 51, a computer expert from Bellevue.

	Martha Rial/Post-Gazette
	Frank Kelly , right, of Bellevue, gives sales pitch to moderators and group of unemployed professionals participating in a "branding bootcamp" session during a Priority Two at Northway Christian Community Church in Wexford. Kelly is joined by Pat Sullivan (left) , of Franklin Park who is looking for work as a business systems analyst.

He was practicing reciting a short summary of his skills with a small group of middle-aged professionals who, like him, are out of work. He hopes the lion tamer line will help him stand out among a flood of job applicants, something he and the others were being trained to do at a regular Monday night meeting of Priority Two, a nonprofit employment assistance group.

"Everyone in that room right now is a salesman, no matter what they were yesterday,'' Joseph Yarzebinski, an economic and community development adviser from Allison Park, said as the Priority Two meeting began at the Northway Christian Community Church in Wexford. "And I have to believe I have the best product on the market right now."

With unemployment at a seven-year high in the Pittsburgh region, out-of-work professionals are flocking to such self-help job search networks as Priority Two, Among Friends and the Pennsylvania Professional Employment Network (PAPEN). More formal programs, including the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program, Uptown, and the Career Development Center operated by the Jewish Family & Children's Services in Squirrel Hill, also are seeing an increase in jobless clients.

"Unfortunately, this business is booming,'' said Priority Two director Charlie Beck, whose weekly group meetings attract between 100 and 150 people searching for work, roughly 10 times the number he saw two years ago.

The networking groups operate as an almost parallel job search system to high-priced headhunters and to CareerLink, the state's one-stop employment service for job seekers and employers. The self-help groups "tend to be very professional and wonderfully linked in terms of job leads,'' said Anne McCafferty, project director for the University of Pittsburgh's Human Capital Policy Initiative.

Even though long-term demographic trends point to future shortages of workers, the job market today seems nearly as precarious as it was in the 1980s, when Pittsburgh lost much of its steel industry and businesses began a wave of restructuring and layoffs in the name of competitiveness. Employment in the six-county region shrank by 12,000 last year, the biggest yearly decline in employment since then.

This time around, Beck and his counterparts at other groups are encountering highly educated white-collar workers whose job searches are taking much longer than they would have a few years ago.

"The people today have skills. They are highly trained, educated, the kind of people that Pittsburgh is crying for, and they are available right now,'' he said. "I'm talking about senior people. There are more people who made $100,000 in their last job unemployed today than there ever have been in the history of Pittsburgh. It's pretty amazing."

The meetings, where members share contacts, take in lectures and offer each other support, attract a diverse group of professionals who are either unemployed or underemployed and looking for a new job.

"We have graphic artists, IT specialists, Web designers, engineers, financial services and insurance people who used to work for large companies now downsizing,'' said Cynthia Mendolia, a sales and marketing professional who volunteers at Among Friends while looking hard for a job.

The job-seekers often are middle-aged and searching for work at a time when both their expectations and family expenses are high. Their job loss can be compounded by college bills for their children and other accumulated debts.

"We're seeing more of the over-55 folks laid off, more professional middle managers and high-level persons and it's tougher than ever for them,'' said Sharyn Goodson, director of Career Development Services in Squirrel Hill. Employers these days have the freedom to choose among a big pool of applicants, she said, making it difficult for older laid-off workers to transfer skills from one industry to another simply because the employer doesn't have to gamble on them.

The job-search groups vary in scope of services and style. Among Friends and PAPEN, for example, have no offices or paid staff and are run by volunteers who have typically taken part in the program themselves.

Priority Two, in existence since the 1980s, is a religious-based program but accepts all comers. The Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program provides assistance to unemployed, underemployed and homeless veterans, their spouses and children. The Jewish Family & Children's Services' Career Development Center is one of several neighborhood sites affiliated with CareerLink, the state's program.

The self-help groups basically are networks of unemployed and underemployed people who develop and share job leads. But they also offer each other much-needed emotional support. "Social networks are unbelievably powerful," Pitt's McCafferty said.

One purchasing executive, who asked to remain anonymous for fear potential employers may perceive her as weak for expressing her feelings, said the people she meets in the self-help groups have been a godsend for her. "There are days when you wake up and you just don't feel like facing the world. You think, 'Hey, I went to school. I worked late. I worked hard. I was dedicated. I worked above and beyond the call of duty. Why did this happen to me? '

Martha Rial/Post-Gazette
Director Charlie Beck encourages participants to network during a Priority Two gathering at Northway Christian Community Church in Wexford.

"So, when you come to these groups, you talk with other people who feel the same way, think the same way, and you realize that you're pretty normal and facing the same challenges. It's not just you. There are more and more people out because of the soft economy."

Priority Two takes a formal approach that has been honed through the years. Its program includes classes on various job search techniques, such as the Branding Boot Camp where Frank Kelly was working on describing his talents and ambitions.

The idea behind the branding class is for the job seeker to perfect a short introduction that will be unique, memorable and compelling, said volunteer instructor Paul Furiga, president of WordWrite Communications, a public relations business. "If it's not memorable, you have failed.''

As Kelly and the other boot-camp participants recited their pitches, hoping to make them sound both pithy and natural, they were critiqued by their peers for content and style. The criticism helps participants smooth rough spots in their delivery and make their statements more understandable to people who might help in the job search.

The group panned one colleague who described himself as an "instigator" in the use of computer technology to improve corporate costs. They applauded another who said he was a "conductor in the IT theater, putting together a company's technology."

Being jobless is difficult enough that some of the boot-camp participants scattered when they were approached by a reporter, not wanting their names or situations to be publicized.

The boot camp training is just one way of preparing job seekers for the principle activity of all of the groups: networking, the art of building for oneself an arsenal of contacts and professional relationships that can be used in the hunt for work.

Most people start with friends, relatives and former work connections. They then branch out to friends of friends and more casual contacts. You never know whom you might meet at the gym, the supermarket or under a hair dryer at the beauty salon.

"It's not so much who you know but who knows you,'' said Yarzebinski, the development adviser who last worked for the Southwestern Pennsylvania Corp., the region's primary transportation planning agency. "So the more networking you do, the more they get to know you, the more they remember you and when the opportunity arises, they are going to say, 'Hey, just talk to Joe.' "

As a recent transplant to Pittsburgh, telecommunications engineer Thomas DePra worked out of his home before being laid off in October from Avaya Inc., a Lucent Technologies spinoff that provides communications equipment and services. He started a job search feeling isolated and disconnected.

"I had not made any contacts. So I really was starting from ground zero as far as networking with people here,'' said DePra, who has since been to meetings of PAPEN, Among Friends and another group called Pro-Career Net. "It's a very tight-knit town but I found people are very willing to help," he said.

Speaking one afternoon after a job interview he garnered thanks to an indirect referral from someone he met at Among Friends, DePra described networking as similar to the idea of the play "Six Degrees of Separation," in which, through a chain of the right six people, one person is connected to any other person.

"It's almost never that you go to one of those meetings and a person is going to directly get a job, but the people who go generally know other people who can be helpful,'' he said. "It's a friend of an acquaintance, an acquaintance of a friend kind of thing."

The opportunity to network draws retailer Daniel Storrs to both Among Friends, which meets on Thursday mornings in a Foster Plaza cafe in Green Tree, and to Priority Two meetings on Mondays.

At Among Friends, there typically is a speaker and then participants divide into small groups where they distribute business cards and try to help each other with the names of contacts who may be able to help in the job search.

Storrs said the exercise helps him avoid feeling like a down-in-the-dumps "gloomy Gus" and keeps him actively in the hunt for work. He previously managed an Eckerd Drug Store, a group of retail outlets in the Airmall at Pittsburgh International Airport a Toys R Us in Columbus, Ohio, and a J.P. Snodgrass, a 17-unit jeans company in Cleveland.

Storrs estimated he met at least 50 people in four months of networking and can count on one of his hands the number of times he's been given the brush-off. "People generally want to help you and they will really try,'' he said. "I'm optimistic about it even though I don't have a job today because I have connected with so many good people."

Networking comes naturally to some people -- the born politicians and perhaps the savvy socialites. But for others, it's a difficult and sometimes foreign task to promote yourself.

Making a cold call on the telephone to seek guidance from strangers on your job search can be particularly hard for those people whose prior jobs did not involve making contact with the public.

"That telephone sometimes feels like it weighs 50 pounds,'' said William Wolfe, a Priority Two volunteer and vice president of outplacement services for The Callos Companies.

Wolfe suggests that job seekers know their script well enough so that it rolls off the tongue effortlessly without sounding practiced. He also advises keeping a resume by the telephone to answer specific questions about job history.

"It's very important in a job search today to come across as a confident individual, a professional individual,'' Wolfe said. "It's very important to communicate to the world what you are looking for and who you are."

Dennis Bouche, a corporate controller left jobless by the bankruptcy of his former employer, The Carbide/Graphite Group, has made looking for a job a full-time affair. He typically starts at 8 a.m., looking at Internet job postings and networking, and doesn't knock off until 4 p.m.

"When I started this process and was advised to make 40 to 50 phone calls a week, I nearly passed out,'' said Bouche, who qualifies for the Vietnam veterans self-help program because of his service as a Marine gunnery sergeant in the first Gulf War. "It's almost guaranteed you're going to destroy the first five or 10 (calls) until you get a knack for this. Then it comes naturally."

One cardinal rule of networking is to avoid directly asking your contact for a job, a request that can quickly end a conversation. You may have better luck asking for advice or guidance about the industry or company in which you are interested, or asking if they can refer you to someone else.

"Don't ask them for a job, ask them to be an ear to the ground for you,'' said David Bates, a retired U.S. Steel executive who ran the church-supported Interfaith Reemployment Group in the South Hills for 13 years until 1999.

"Ask me for a job, I say, 'No,' and the conversation is over. Ask me for advice, and we might sit and talk for an hour and you might learn something," said Bates, who still counsels the unemployed from his home under the name Ideal Reemployment Group.

Another tip: Don't wait to start a new job search after a layoff, even though the temptation to take a break for a month or longer is understandable, warns Mendolia, the Among Friends coordinator.

"If there's one thing I've learned after being off for nine months, it is that you have to immediately start the search on day one,'' she said. "Start now! If you're going to go to school, go now!"