Thursday, June 14, 2012

Seeing the Layoff as an Opportunity

When it comes to layoffs, I've been around the barn quite a few times. My first layoff experience happened in 1996 when I was a department manager in a medium-sized company, and I had to lay off half of my department. I won't describe the gory details, but I can tell you it was a gut-wrenching experience for each person who was laid off and for me. I cared a lot about the people who worked for and with me, and laying them off was like laying off my family. I became so depressed that I only lasted a few months after that before leaving the company I had been with for 16 years.

The next experience came in 2001 when I was laid off for the first time. I had only been with the company for two years, so I was not strongly bonded with the company, but I took it as a blow to my professional self-esteem. I again experienced depression and a sense of loss and rejection.

The next two layoffs came close together. I took a temporary job that lasted a little over six months before I was laid off. Even though it was temporary, I had enjoyed the job tremendously, so I again felt a deep sense of loss.

The third layoff came in 2003 from a government job that I thought would be mine until I retired. Within a year and a half after I had joined up, the agency lost grant funding, and I was the first one laid off because of their last-hired first-fired policy. Others of my coworkers soon followed, and the agency itself was reorganized. This was the hardest layoff because it had been a career transition for me into a new career that I dearly loved, and I had hired into an agency with great people whom I dearly missed after the layoff.

The fourth and last layoff was in 2010 from a company I had worked for twice, in two three-year stints. In that layoff, about a third of the company was let go, and we were told our jobs were being outsourced to India. What a blow! We had been training our Indian coworkers for years and thought we were all going to keep working as two parallel departments half a world apart. I had grown to really love and appreciate my Indian counterparts. What a surprise to come in one morning and find out that our Indian friends were getting our jobs, and our department was reduced from five people to one person. Try as I might, I could not hold it against the wonderful, charming, kind-hearted people in India that I had worked with, but it was still a shock and a disappointment to be losing my job.

The layoffs brought many lessons that I'll share in future posts, but two stand out in my mind as the most significant lessons. The first is that it is vitally important to get lots of counseling after a layoff. Grief and depression over the loss of a job are inevitable for most people, and you cannot make good decisions about your future career when you are grieving the last job. Even if you are one of the ones who gets to stay while other coworkers are laid off, it's very likely you will experience a sense of loss. Please--get some help. At the very least, talk it out with a trusted friend until you can let it go and move on. Ideally, get professional counseling. I made some faulty career decisions after my layoffs because I was upset. First get your head clear, and then make your career decisions.

The second lesson that stands out with crystal clarity for me is that every layoff brought with it wonderful opportunities. At the time, each one seemed like a terrible ending. The reality is that each one propelled me into a new, different, and exciting phase of my career. For example, the layoff in 2001 resulted in a two-year career change into career counseling. My next two jobs were about helping others deal with job loss and find new jobs, and it was the best, most satisfying work I've ever done. Because of my layoffs, I have met many wonderful people while networking, and I have had a diversity of job experiences I would not have had if I had stayed with my first company until I retired. I even started my own consulting business, which taught me that I really can be an entrepreneur. In short, the layoffs were difficult endings, but they resulted in a richness in my life and career that I could never have experienced if they had not happened. Every layoff is a great opportunity after you grieve the loss and then start looking forward.

Chuck Petch (chuckpetch.com)

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