Tyler Harnett’s life has taken an unexpected twist since the economy took a turn for the worse. The former teacher of the year at Ottawa High School was let go and has decided to pursue a career in beer brewing.

Unemployed since August, 26-year-old Tyler Harnett continues to see life in a glass-half-full kind of way. To be exact, the glass is half full of a dark, chocolate porter.

Last spring, Harnett learned his contract as an English teacher at Ottawa High School wasn’t being renewed, even though he had won the school’s student-voted Teacher of the Year award.

“If you had told me on the first day I thought about being a teacher that you will win Teacher of the Year and then lose your job, I would say it was never going to happen,” Harnett said. “But the economy has turned in a way that I am having to react to.”

Looking at a job market flooded with job-seeking English teachers, Harnett decided to pursue a different passion: brewing beer.

So this fall, he took the money he collected from selling back his Tempur-Pedic mattress and visited breweries and tap houses from San Francisco to Seattle.

His goal? To become a brewmaster.

“The best advice I got from someone was from a brewer in the Northwest. He said: ‘If you want to get a job coming out of a home brewery, you have to win a home-brew award,'” Harnett said. “So, I’ll be perfecting my art and trying to compete in as many home-brew competitions as possible.”

Harnett is among the growing number of 20-somethings who have found that the country’s recession has meant a major rewrite in life’s plans.

At the launch of their careers, young job seekers are having to rethink their futures, said David Gaston, director of the University Career Center at Kansas University.

“Typically, they’ve gone to Plan B,” Gaston said. “Now we are getting into the C and D and E.”

The highest unemployment rates in the country fall among the country’s youngest workers. In October, when the national unemployment rate peaked at 10.2 percent, the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds was at 15.6 percent. And for those between 25 and 34, it reached 10.8 percent, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows.

High unemployment rates among the country’s youngest workers have more to do with skill level than age, according to Ron Caldwell, an assistant economics professor at KU.

In an e-mail, Caldwell wrote that because younger workers tend to have lower levels of education, they are less productive and more easily replaced. It’s a fact that translates into firms being less likely to hire and more willing to fire them.

“Highly educated workers have more skill and are much harder to replace, so firms will tend to be reluctant to lay them off, even during economic downturns,” Caldwell wrote.

Re-examining plans

After graduating college with student loans, credit card debt and a looming deadline for getting kicked off their parents’ health insurance, young adults have many reasons to want to find a good job — fast.

“Can you imagine entering the job market with these kinds of conditions?” asked Wendy Shoemaker, a senior associate director for the University Career Center at KU. “There’s a lot of anxiety.”

For Nancy Hoch and her friends who recently graduated from KU, the main plan is to continue their education.

“Of my 10 good friends, nine are going back to school,” said Hoch, who finished KU this winter with majors in political science and international studies and is planning to go to law school next fall. As students who have watched the economy’s downward spiral for a good part of their college lives, Hoch and her classmates didn’t expect many job prospects when they finished.

“We knew it would be rough coming out,” she said.

Until she starts law school, Hoch is working a freelance job where she contracts with graphic designers to find work for them online. As for her friends, Hoch said, some have moved back in with their parents. On the weekends, they come to Lawrence and crash on her couch. Others took jobs in coffee shops.

“It is frustrating, but you’re not desperate,” she said.

You could hear the desperation a little more in the voice of Marjorie Watson. The 30-year-old single mom of five kids was looking for employment at the Lawrence Workforce Center on Friday morning. She spends four hours there every morning.

“It’s very scary,” she said of her months being unemployed.

Watson has been looking for a job since November, when she realized she was getting too few hours working as a caregiver for people with disabilities.

Since then she has applied to work at Long John Silver’s, Family Video and Vangent.

“I’ve never been without a job,” she said.

Pursing dreams

Some young adults have found success following their dreams. For instance, Emily Hendricks, who will graduate from KU in May, moved to Manhattan and landed an entry-level position working at a public relations firm. But it took several weeks of not having a job or an apartment before success struck. And, she found the job through a friend.

“I feel there was a weird combination of circumstances. Or otherwise I would be out of luck, too,” she said.

As Harnett waits for his dream to unfold as a brewmaster, he has been applying for almost any job he can find. Those have included janitorial work, bank teller and even an attempt to be a rock cutter for the geology department.

To make ends meet, he does handyman work for his dad’s rental properties and has returned to the thrifty spending habits of his college days.

“It’s sort of shameful having to go back to the folks, but it is honest work,” he said.

And he has been perfecting his craft. Right now that craft happens to be fermenting in the corner of his dining room. It’s a dark, chocolate porter with a taste of burnt coffee.

“Losing a job has allowed me to see that I can do other things,” he said. “To go on an creative adventure. To learn more about life and not just about a job.”