The 55-year-old intern: A tale of the downturn

Elizabeth Romanaux spent the spring compiling contact lists and doing other administrative tasks at the PR firm where she works, and sometimes fetching lunch.

Nothing unusual about that--she's an intern. But here's what's surprising: she's 55.

After losing her job as a media relations manager, Romanaux took the unpaid gig with a PR firm in New Jersey in order to keep her skills up and make connections, with the hope that in the long run it would lead her back to gainful employment.

"You have to suck it up sometimes and do what a 17-year-old would happily do and be happy about it," she told Reuters.

She's not alone. Experts say the number of mid-career interns has shot up since the downturn began.

"There has definitely been almost an explosion of this kind of thing," said Liz Ryan, a career counselor. Ryan said before 2008, she'd never been asked by someone mid-career for help getting an internship. But that year, she fielded 20 such questions, and since then she's received around 35 or so annually.

By most measures, younger workers have borne the brunt of the unemployment crisis. But the problem of long-term joblessness has hit workers in their 50s and 60s especially hard. Some employers are reluctant to hire unemployed workers of that age--something a lot of Yahoo readers told us about in response to our recent request for personal experiences of long-term unemployment. (We'll have more on that pretty soon.) As a result, many ultimately give up looking and hold on until retirement.

Or, like Romanaux, they take unpaid work.

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