Bangalore: A skillful person never lets his skills rest and rust whatever situation he finds himself in. Same is the story of Laurianne Dobbins, a 45 year old mechanical designer who decided against rest although she lost her job last April. In order to keep her busy and close to what she liked doing, she purchased a training edition of the drafting software and made proper use of it by practicing daily, as stated by Reuters. "If you don't do it every day you can lose the skills," said Dobbins, from Rochester, New York. "I didn't want that to happen to me." "In my situation I felt the need to justify all my time," she said. "My whole lifestyle changed." She is the live example of survival of the fittest and her fight has added to the heat to the economic debate in U.S. where the biggest question is how to generate employment for the unemployed. "In occupations that are more skilled and change a lot, if you haven't done something to keep up, the employer might think: Why should we spend a lot of our money over the next few months to get this person back up to speed?" said Gary Burtless, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution."But I would suspect that in more occupations, the only skill that atrophies is the ability to get up and go to work every morning." According to the recent statistics, it's for more than six months that almost 42 percent people have stayed unemployed that clearly indicates the peak that the US long-term unemployment has now achieved. The Labor Department has quoted a figure of 37 percent having just a high school diploma and 20 percent being college graduates as the education qualifications prevailing. It has also stated that job opportunities are more for the people who are unemployed for the maximum period of a month rather than those who have been out of work for more than a year. Columbia University economics professor Till von Wachter opines that the bend of a personnel officer towards hiring an employed person or someone who has stayed unemployed for a shorter duration of time is not necessarily a wrong instinct. And as long-term unemployment becomes virtually institutionalized, the impact of those jobless workers fades on the broader picture of employment. Opportunities for rising wages can start to occur even with a high unemployment rate which is the cause of worry for central bankers.