It’s a sign of the market when the amount of people I’m talking to have been made redundant is steadily increasing. And the annoying thing is too many people only come to me months after they have left the company, sometimes 6 months of unemployment, and I ask – is the pay-off worth it?
Gone are the days when it was 2 years up-front salary, today its more likely to be 1 year’s if you stay at the company until the end of the consultation period. In return they want you to stay working for them, handing over everything nicely until they are ready for you to go. This is the bargain.
In my experience its not worth it. Yes you get a big sum of money you can put towards your mortgage or whatever, but is it worth the period of unemployment that inevitably follows? Is it worth the disruption to your career path? Or the stigma of having been “made redundant”?
A lot of people seem to first react with a head-in-the-sand approach whilst the consultation goes on, and then I suspect that rather than tackle this change of plan head-on, the idea of a couple of months “holiday” starts to grow on them. And it’s always a surprise to me how long people last, I suppose the injection of all that immediate cash keeps the show on the road for a while. I get the impression the holiday idea wears off pretty soon once the cold, hard reality of what is essentially unemployment kicks in.
And then it seems to be a period of time before they contact a recruiter as well – madness.
In short I just don’t think the cash is worth the potential misery of 3 months unemployment.
So here is my advice to anyone put “at risk” of redundancy:
– Start your jobsearch immediately. Get real. You have been fired. It wasn’t through any fault of your own – which really sucks – but now you have to focus all your energies on getting a better job right away.
– Update your CV, brush the cobwebs off your Linked IN profile and add your contact details to your home page, start applying for adverts and get your CV on the jobboards.
– Network! Think – who do you know who might be worth getting in contact with. Whether they can help you directly or they will know someone who can, it is always worth getting the message out that you are looking
– Start preparing for interviews. Annoyingly the chances are that the first interview you get will be for a really good job. So start preparing early! If you are a techie – there are plenty of resources out there, from the answers to all the threading questions there are to taking a brainbench test and working out where your weak points are before an interviewer does.
Martin Jee's blog 