If the economy is on the way to recovery in 2010, as some experts suggest is likely, the unemployment rate will begin to decline. Another labor statistic is not likely to be so responsive.

Some 7.8 million people are working part time for economic reasons, a 3.1 million increase since January 2008. That number includes workers who would prefer full-time employment but are settling for less, either because their employers cut their hours or they can't find positions, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Many of these workers may believe their part-time gigs are temporary. But it won't be long before the situation is the new "business as usual," says management consultant B.K. Simerson of Tradewinds Consulting in St. Charles, Ill. Simerson also is author of "Fired, Laid Off, Out of a Job" (Praeger Publishers, 2003).

There's a sea change occurring in the U.S. job market, says Simerson, who predicts that the day is coming when full-time positions with benefits will be a rarity. He believes this is not a temporary setback but an evolutionary change in the U.S. job market.

Simerson is not alone in this view. Employer-employee relationships of the future will be fundamentally and irrevocably transformed, says Michael Williams, dean of Touro College's Graduate School of Business in New York.

Williams sees a future work force comprised mostly of temporary, contractual workers who move from one paid arrangement to the next and individuals who "cobble together" a living by working multiple jobs.

Though these individuals might have a primary occupation, "they will have secondary and perhaps even tertiary jobs, all relating to a certain set of skills," Williams says.

Others will be forced to attain new skills and enter new fields. Many of today's laid-off workers don't yet realize that it's not a matter of finding a similar job."They won't be going back to the same businesses. Why? Because those jobs will never exist again," Williams says.

Nearly a decade ago, countless professionals were pushed out of high-tech telecommunications jobs, never to return. University enrollments went up, entrepreneurship took off and folks entered different fields, such as real estate.

The current economic crisis is producing similar reactions, with many displaced professionals likely to go back to school, Williams says.

Entrepreneurship will provide for more than half of the gross national product, which Williams says is testament to Americans' resilience and ingenuity."This sounds counterintuitive," he says, "but this is the best time in the world to be out of a job."

And despite the upheavals he sees ahead, Simerson believes people should hunt for jobs that add meaning and satisfaction to their lives.

"We get to decide how to spend our time and exert our energy," Simerson says. "People who are laid off and experiencing a lot of pain inevitably come out on the other side better off, because unemployment leads to soul-searching."