"These are people who have defined a great set of skills and said, 'Since everybody is stretched and needs some of what I can provide, I'm going to work as many different jobs as I can.' Employers are more flexible about how they think of workers, and employees are more accepting of what's acceptable to me."
Werley cited the example of a lawyer who is training as a mediator while getting paid to be a career coach, a public school advocate and a lawyer.
"She's using every skill she has," Werley said.
Still others are more like Draegin, delaying what could be a futile job search by trying to learn something new.
A group that focuses on sabbaticals, yoursabbatical.com, reported that an out-of-work consultant who recognized early on that it was a terrible time to job-hunt decided to do a Spanish immersion in Peru for three months, giving the economy a little time to strengthen, and allowing him to return with "fluent in Spanish" on his resume.
After Draegin started at WOW's unglamorous offices in Midtown Manhattan, no one knew quite how to describe her position.
Was she a "senior" intern, an "executive" intern, a "midcareer" intern -- or, as she prefers, an apprentice?
"We're just glad to have her," said Deborah Barrow, WOW's editor in chief, who knew Draegin from the magazine network and dreamed up this scheme to give her a two-month, three-mornings-a-week internship.
Draegin has been getting a lot out of the experience because this has not been a business-as-usual internship. As in: Get me my coffee, pick up my dry cleaning, and if you're lucky, by the end of the summer we'll let you write a caption.
Draegin has been learning by doing and watching and asking for help.
Arriving before 8 one day, her immediate task was to look for story ideas and mash together information from other websites into a brief news item for the "Wow Watch" column. Finding topics was easy enough -- Draegin fits WOW's demographic and instinctively understands the interests of its savvy readers.
But she repeatedly had to check her gut instincts against that all-important tool -- Google Trends -- to make sure her ideas would attract readers to the website. That morning, she chose to put yet another angle on a story about the California mother of octuplets who has been omnipresent on the Web.
Draegin quickly cranked out four paragraphs emphasizing that the "octomom" had decided to give all eight babies the same middle name -- Angel.
