Kevin Kendall of Indiana lost his airline job and found a career in pet waste removal. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Kendall)

Kevin Kendall, a 30-year veteran airline dispatcher, scoops poop from 15 to 20 backyards daily across northern Kentucky, occasionally playing fetch with one of the canine clients he serves as a Pet Butler franchisee.

Silvana Clark, a former motivational speaker, traverses the country, distributing shoes to the needy from a roving RV. David Heitner, a longtime banker, left his Wall Street office to start a company that specializes in cleaning offices.

A far cry from these workers’ original callings, these careers reveal the variety of ways some face the prospect of corporate cuts with a hearty mix of courage and cunning. With unemployment hovering near 10 percent since January, it’s likely that more American workers will find themselves confronting career change and the uncertainties — and, often, possibilities — it brings.

“A career is a marathon,” says Caroline Dowd-Higgins, who writes the workplace blog NotTheCareerIOrdered.com. “It’s rare we do the same thing for life. Change can be very empowering.”

Kendall, owner of the pet waste service, was laid off from his longtime airline job in October 2009. Searching for a new gig — he was interested in buying a franchise — that was “a little bit quirky, with a fun side to it,” he found that Pet Butler provided just the opportunity he had been looking for. “It’s still a serious business, but it’s been really enjoyable. And it’s proving to be recession-proof,” he said in a telephone interview. He services clients once or twice weekly, driving a branded van and donning the official Pet Butler button-down shirt and khakis, a friendly respite from the standard business slacks and demanding holiday-and-weekend schedule at the airline.

Clark, the motivational speaker who struggled for gigs as companies eliminated budgets, and her husband of 32 years found themselves asking, “What can we do that is fulfilling and gives us some income and lets us travel?” The pair pitched an idea to Soles4Souls, a charity that collects and distributes shoes to the needy: Buy us an RV and let us travel across the country, visiting shelters, hospitals and centers and distributing shoes on our way. Thirteen months later, the Clarks have visited 33 states and logged 30,000 miles, leaving a path of donated shoes in their wake.

With experience cleaning pizzerias gleaned as a part-timer back in his early 20s, 42-year-old entrepreneur Heitner of New Jersey left his banking job during the 2002 recession to found Heits Building Services, a cleaning company that has expanded to five states. “When you get this bug in your head,” he says, “you can’t give it up. I took that leap of faith. The stress” of entrepreneurship “is comparable to banking. But here, you have control. With the stock market, you have no control.” To hear him reflect on the changes in corporate America over the past decade, there’s little wonder why many longtime businesspeople leave for different pastures: “The environment has changed. People no longer have a sense of job security, and they’re concerned about losing their jobs before retirement. Corporate America,” he says, “is overrated.”The other workers agree: They needed a tipping point, a blessing in disguise — a layoff, the recession, a tempting retirement option — to jump-start their dreams. “I’m having a ball,” says Eric Diaz of New Jersey, a traveling pet groomer. Though unexpected, he says of the experience, “everything just happened perfectly.”

Some of the laid-off remain hopeful for work in their original fields. Last December, Maria Lekic, an elementary school teacher from Kew Gardens, N.Y., was forced out of her third-grade-teacher position at a public school in Harlem. She was just months shy of earning tenure, which would’ve guaranteed her a steady income. But at only 25, with her credentials — an advanced degree in education, extensive experience in teaching English and in running educational programs — she can’t bear to change careers. “I feel like I’m just getting started,” she says. “I don’t want to fall behind yet.”

But then there’s Diaz, who has made a name for himself as a pet groomer after a decades-long career in the futures department at Merrill Lynch, where he created an operations system used worldwide. “After 25 years of doing the same thing, even though I loved doing it, I did reach a point where I was ready to do something else,” he said by phone.

After accepting an early-retirement option, Diaz traveled widely on his own, then with his kids and with his wife, before deciding to buy an RV and run his own Aussie Pet Mobile operation, a pet grooming franchise. “I’d never groomed a dog before!” he says, but within his first year, he hit 300-plus clients. “My client services background was actually preparing me for dog grooming,” says Diaz.

The opportunity to start anew is particularly exhilarating for those approaching retirement age. For career changers “who are able to find the perfect or even a good fit, the satisfaction and quality of life are exceptional,” says Arthur Koff, who runs RetiredMinds.com, a job board for workers looking for all sorts of jobs. (As of press time, the site posted seven listings for goatherds.) “Studies have shown that those who continue to work are much more likely to live longer and healthier lives,” Koff said in an e-mail interview. “How many of us have known people who’ve retired and pass away within a relatively short period of time?” For those “who are able to start anew, it’s a whole new beginning.”

Career changes such as these are part of a trend that’s challenging to pinpoint. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not keep figures on how often workers switch careers because of the difficulty in defining what a career change really means. As its Web site asks, “Did a construction worker who decided to start his own home-remodeling business experience a career change? What about a newspaper reporter who became a TV news anchor? Each … involves a change in occupation, industry, or both, but do they represent career changes?” The BLS will not track these sorts of changes, the site says, “until a consensus emerges among economists, sociologists, career-guidance professionals and other labor market observers.”

Path-changing professionals interviewed for this article agree that previous professions paved the way for their new careers.” “Part of it is having fun,” says Clark, the traveling shoe distributor.

“But what we like so much is that there’s a purpose too,” Clark says. “If we just spent all our time traveling from one tourist attraction to the next, it’d be one thing, but knowing that two to three times per week, we’re contributing at a homeless shelter or hospital? That’s the most fulfilling.”