Vallejo resident Barbara Wishom is doing everything she can to land a job. She has a Facebook account for networking, she attends career fairs and workshops, and she took two temporary jobs hoping it would help her land a permanent one.

Wishom said she worked at Washington Mutual in the residential home mortgages lending department for 14 years before she was laid off in 2008.

"I was embarrassed to tell people at first," Wishom recalled about losing her job.

She is not alone. Just like nearly 10,000 other Vallejoans, Wishom is still without a job despite all her efforts.

"It's a much different world now," said Robert Bloom, president of the Workforce Investment Board of Solano County.

Bloom oversees two centers of the federally funded Solano Employment Center -- in Fairfield and Vallejo -- and has noticed a significant increase in the number of clients the centers serve.

"We are inundated with people, and the workshops are overflowing," Bloom said.

That's largely due to the fact that unemployment rates have more than doubled in the past four years. Government figures show that in Solano County, the jobless numbers have climbed to 12.4 percent of the work force. The hardest hit has been Vallejo, with 15.1 percent unemployment, but the number of jobless in all seven cities has more than doubled in all cities.. .