AFTER 20 YEARS as a lawyer, Nora Fascenelli is heading back down the career ladder -- and she couldn't be happier.

The 46-year-old divorced mother is a cub reporter for the Yuma (Ariz.) Daily Sun and a graduate of a job-training "boot camp" for midlife career changers. Having chosen the law at her father's urging, Ms. Fascenelli says she never found a "comfort level" in the work. Journalism, on the other hand, always had an appeal.

So when she heard Thomson Corp., of Toronto, was recruiting a class of about 20 reporter-trainees for a 12-week program last fall, she "jumped at the chance" to enroll, she says. Her paycheck now is a lot smaller than the one she got as an attorney, but she says she views the stint as "a three-year paid internship" for bigger things. "Now I highlight things I had learned to obfuscate while writing briefs as a lawyer," she says.

Across a range of industries, many companies desperate for qualified employees in a competitive labor market are creating similar retraining programs, hoping to recruit experienced workers from other fields. And workers, from lawyers to longshoremen, are finding the intensive courses make it far easier than it used to be to begin a new career. "The breadth of opportunity is considerable," says Roberts Jones, president of the National Alliance of Business, an employer group. "The market is tighter than a banjo, so employers have to retrain people who have been working at something else."

Trucking companies, facing a shortage of drivers, are trying to keep up with booming demand for freight services by adopting the boot camp approach. Meanwhile, on Long Island, in New York, where massive cutbacks in aerospace and defense industries sent unemployment soaring in the mid-1990s, retraining centers -- many of them on college campuses -- are helping to turn engineers into computer technicians for companies hungry for skilled information-technology workers, says Scott Passeser, a vice president at Integrated Systems Group, a Hauppauge, N.Y. consulting firm. Such retraining efforts helped push Long Island's jobless rate to a record low of 2.6% in May.

One big advantage of these second-career programs is they produce workers who aren't completely new to the work force: An employer usually doesn't have to wonder whether they will show up for work on time. But there also may be a downside to workers who make a habit of job-switching, according to a recent joint poll by the Society for Human Resource Management, an Alexandria, Va., employer group, and careerjournal.com. Many HR managers and job seekers surveyed said frequent job-changers may be unreliable and lack career direction.

"Job hopping is not a win for either party in the long run," insists Susan Meisinger, SHRM executive vice president. "Taking the time to make a significant contribution at an organization is important to a worker's growth professionally and personally."

Perhaps nowhere have boot-camp training courses been embraced more eagerly than in the computer help-desk field. Companies face an acute shortage of people qualified to staff both internal help desks and customer-assistance units. Complicating the shortage is another factor: Many narrowly focused computer techies lack the "people skills" needed to provide friendly guidance to hapless millions trying to navigate computer networks.

A lack of computer expertise actually is a plus for recruits to help-desk boot camp, says Eric Rabinowitz, principal of IHS Help Desk Services, a New York provider and consulting company. Led by the Help Desk Institute, a trade group based in Colorado Springs, Colo., the industry is training neophytes including former stock brokers, flight attendants, bank tellers and even a former member of the White House press corps to be help-desk helpers.

James Beattie has worked at a ski lodge, as a cook and pottery-store manager, but decided to take one of the institute's help-desk training courses. Now he is making $30,000 a year as a help-desk analyst in New York, working for insurance company American International Group. "I can see a number of opportunities in the near future," Mr. Beattie says.

Duff Swain and Lawrence LeGrand, two Columbus, Ohio, trucking industry executives, founded a company in Puerto Rico to recruit and provide early training of drivers for freight companies on the U.S. mainland. Operating out of a converted tuna factory in Mayaguez, Worldwide Solutions provides about six weeks of training in language, work habits and driving skills, then turns recruits over for on-the-job training at mainland trucking firms such as M.S. Carriers, of Memphis, Tenn., which has signed up for 1,000 Worldwide Solutions grads.

Many of the recruits are drawn from Puerto Rico's swollen ranks of unemployed workers. Others, though, are teachers, firemen, office managers and others looking for a job paying more than the typical annual wage of $16,000 to $17,000.

Worldwide Solutions' boot camp, like many others, emphasizes total immersion in new skills and one-on-one supervision. The company crams classroom and behind-the-wheel instruction into nine weeks. "It's very intense and closely scrutinized," says Mr. Swain, the company's chairman.

The first class included trainees with some experience driving trucks, but no one who had handled an 18-wheeler before. Nelson Loranzana, of Bayamon, P.R., who previously had worked as an inspector at a Johnson & Johnson plant, found the experience a little unsettling. "At first, you get a little nervous -- it was a challenge," he says. What made him especially nervous was driving the big rigs at night. "It was really hard, because it was really dark," he says.

Thomson started its program because of difficulties its community newspapers were finding in recruiting college graduates. These days, budding reporters, facing an abundance of opportunities at both online media companies and established newspapers, often find themselves on a fast track to the big time, without having to pay dues at small-town papers.

Jim Jennings, a Thomson vice president and editorial director, says 18 trainees from the first boot camp have gone on to jobs at Thomson papers around the country. Thomson's decision to sell its community newspapers three months ago put plans for a second class on hold.

The first grads included a theology professor, music-store salesman, prison officer, social worker and pizza deliveryman. Rachel Wion, who had been laid off as a customer-service representative for a church directories publisher, applied for the Thomson class as a way to continue receiving unemployment benefits. She finished first in the class and now is a general assignment reporter for the Bucyrus (Ohio) Telegraph-Forum. Frank Scotello, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who helped plan logistics for the Gulf War and later taught English in college, is a business reporter with the Reporter, Thomson's newspaper in Fond du Lac, Wis.

Thomson's boot camp took place in a model newsroom at the company's Oshkosh (Wis.) Northwestern newspaper. Courses included journalism history, writing snappy ledes and how to cover everything from car crashes to city council meetings. Once a week, trainees were sent out to one of eight nearby Thomson papers to pick up pointers from reporters covering police, travel, lifestyle and other beats. Some trainees even delivered newspapers and fielded customer complaints.

Lou Ziegler, a Thomson community and metro newspaper editor, taught the course with guest lecturers from other papers. Bill Rungee, for example, an editor from Cordele, Ga., told how to put crime stories together. "He was ruthless," Ms. Fascenelli recalls. He'd walk around as students wrote their stories and announce that deadline had arrived. If anyone kept writing, he'd turn off the computer.