TAMPA, Fla. _ As a few dozen real estate and title insurance agents mingle around a steakhouse’s bar at a networking mixer, one shares a sardonic joke: Is it OK to pray for a hurricane?

The storms can devastate, but they also stir up business in real estate and construction.

Over beers and gin and tonics at a recent gathering, the mixer crowd revealed the major career moves their friends and spouses are contemplating. One woman said her husband is studying to become a nurse after years as a property appraiser.

Next to her, a veteran mortgage broker said three of his former colleagues are looking at nursing, too.

Like thousands of others, they had bet their livelihoods on Florida’s unrelenting growth, which had been one of its three economic pillars, along with agriculture and tourism. But with that pillar cracked, middle-age workers in particular are confronting tough questions about what to do next.

Fearing that they’re too old to retrain in something new, many wonder where their skills fit in the future economy.

“It may mean that some of those people (in growth-related fields) never get those jobs again,” said Sean Snaith, who heads the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida.

The number of people tied to growth who have lost jobs in this recession is remarkable.

Today, there are about 407,000 construction jobs in Florida, about 40 percent fewer than three years ago. The fallout has been less severe among real estate agents and brokers: Only about 8 percent of their jobs have disappeared, falling to about 124,000 in Florida, state data show. However, agents suggest many of the people remaining in real estate are hanging on at a fraction of their former pay.

State and federal jobs data don’t isolate many growth-related jobs, such as mortgage brokers, title insurance agents and building materials manufacturers, so the number of displaced workers is probably thousands higher.

Bud Krueger is a casualty.

In 2006, Krueger was a top building executive for DSW in Columbus, Ohio, then a fast-growing chain of shoe stores. He lived at 30,000 feet, flying to DSW’s new stores across the country four days a week.

It was a good job with a good salary of about $95,000. He and his wife, Carol, had family and longtime roots in the Midwest.

Then, a new opportunity emerged in Florida that offered Krueger, 59, a chance to oversee shopping centers, not just individual shoe stores.

A project management firm, 3rd Works, was swimming in construction projects in Florida. Big shopping centers, including Cypress Creek Town Center in Pasco County and Southshore Commons in Apollo Beach, were planned, and 3rd Works had been hired to help shepherd them.

“I remember asking him, ‘Are you sure this is what you want to do?”’ Carol Krueger said.

“My gut told me this was the wrong move,” Bud said. “But I’d already made a commitment to 3rd Works and they had enough work booked up that I thought I’d be set for 10 years.”

Fresh start in Florida

Bud moved to Tampa in January 2007, sharing an apartment with his grown son until Carol moved down. Their grown daughter stayed in Ohio. Eventually, Carol landed a job at an insurance office in Land O’ Lakes.

Today, the date of his layoff and his tenure at 3rd Works are etched in his mind. As the shopping center projects _ most little more than engineering reports at that point _ suffered long delays or were shelved altogether, the company laid him off in October 2008.

He has had a couple of short-term jobs, but primarily has spent 16 months attending job networking events, calling on hiring managers and taking computer courses related to project management.

He sounds a bit defeatist at times, worrying that his age scares potential employers, that he doesn’t have the money to retrain and that he lacks the niche skills to land one of the new road, bridge or bullet train jobs promised by the Obama administration.

Still, he’s willing to move anywhere for a construction-related job. Even with a four-year college degree and 38 years in construction, he’s not sure where his skills fit in the economy.

“I don’t know what else to look at,” Bud said. “If people came to me and said, ‘Would you pursue this?’ If I thought I stood a chance at landing that job, yes, I would.”

Industry in transition

Where construction and real estate types fit into the near and midterm economy is a concern.

Many in construction-related fields might have turned to manufacturing, another relatively high-paying career, particularly for those without college degrees. But manufacturing in Florida has lost more than 150,000 jobs in the past decade, or a third of its total.

Economists don’t expect the construction industry to see the high-flying days of 2005 for years. Snaith, the UCF economist, foresees construction employment bottoming out at the end of the year with 381,100 jobs in the state. By the end of 2013, it should rise to about 447,000 jobs.

That’s an improvement, but it’s roughly the level the industry was at in 1999. Meanwhile, the state’s population has risen 20 percent, with many newcomers such as Krueger drawn to Florida for work.

Instead of construction-related fields, the big growth industries this decade likely will be information technology and health care. Network systems analysts and computer software engineers are listed as the two careers likely to grow the fastest through 2017, according to the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation.

Among the remaining top 10 careers, six are in health care. Roofers crack the list at No. 10, but that assumes an economic and construction recovery, the agency says.

Presumably, many in the construction industry will turn to the service sector, installing cable TV service, selling insurance or driving trucks. But for now, people in the industry say many displaced laborers have left Florida or are scraping by as handymen.

From high to low

Bill Dixon worked for 17 years for Nu-Air Manufacturing, a 60-year-old Town ‘N Country company that made windows and doors and employed 500 people. Former President George W. Bush held up Nu-Air as a model family business when he visited the plant in 2004 and talked about the economy with its workers.

Rocked by the real estate crash, Nu-Air shut its doors about a year ago, laid off its workers and sold the Nu-Air name to a businessman, who relocated to Alabama. Today, Dixon, 55, runs a small business that cuts lawns and fixes windows. He’s making three-quarters of his former salary, and his wife, who lost her job at Nu-Air, too, hasn’t found new work.

Still, he’s doing better than most handymen by focusing on cleaning and repairing abandoned homes.

“Most of the other people that were doing repairs like I’m doing, they’ve shut down,” he said.

Florida’s economic development leaders are spending billions trying to attract high-paying life sciences and technology companies. Since 2003, the state and local governments in Florida have spent $1.5 billion to attract clusters of biotech firms.

The results have been less than stellar, the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability found in a January report. About 36 biotech companies have sprouted in the six counties that got incentive money, and only 19 of them have employees or are paying wages, the accountability office said.

Economic development leaders say it will take time.

If it’s hard to see carpenters and window manufacturers working with petri dishes and microscopes, state officials insist that an influx of high-paid scientists will cause a ripple effect. The theory is biotech firms will need construction workers to build labs and manufacturing workers to make their health care products.

“Those in the construction fields and manufacturing fields, as this grows, they benefit as well,” said Chris Hart, head of the jobs policy board Workforce Florida.

Even among young people, who might be able to wait out the construction doldrums, many are opting out of the industry or at least picking niche segments they hope will offer more opportunity.

The University of Florida’s Rinker School of Building Construction used to turn down at least 40 percent of the 210 applicants trying to enroll annually, but today there are just enough applicants to keep the classes full, the school’s director said.

On a recent weekday, dozens of mostly young electrician apprentices were studying at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Tampa training center. Several had worked on a new solar power plant in Arcadia, which President Barack Obama visited in October, and seemed bullish on the future of “green” jobs.

“With the president and everything going on in the House and Senate, it should do wonders for our trade,” said Scott Harrison, a 21-year-old who’s hoping to become a journeyman electrician and go on to an electrical engineering degree