Attention - it's layoff time again!

This is the time of year when companies finally face up the the fact that they need to make changes. Unfortunately, too many make the wrong changes and never recover.

You are the ideal employee...

You are one dedicated, hard driving employee and you haven't got time for gossip and speculation. You have a backlog of work and you bring it home at times. You wish you had more contacts in the industry so you could see how other companies are doing, but, between work and your family, you don't have a second to spare. Maybe when the quarter is over, you will have some time to spare.

It is the end of the quarter and there are rumors in the cubicles....

Your company has stoutly denied any plans for layoffs, but you have not seen any salesmen high-fiving it for many months now.

Your friends in tech support have been doing the hot suitcase trick for weeks on end and they don't smile either. When you ask how things are going with their customers, their eyes dart nervously around and they say, "We're working on it."

You are very busy with a killer workload, because you are covering for the people who were laid off last year, but it seems like the product releases are slowing down.

You are somewhat afraid to ask your manager how things are going because you have not seen your manager smile, except nervously, since Christmas.

So you keep your head down like a good soldier, and work to the best of your ability. If they are planning layoffs, you want to look as busy as possible.

While you are working, you receive an email from your manager. It is a notification of an unscheduled department meeting at 4:00pm...

And so it begins...

All of the plans for a vacation in the islands start to crumble around you. You were planning to put your trip on your credit cards and pay them off over the next six months.

The payments on the new motorcycle or SUV suddenly loom like an impassible roadblock to your future mobility.

You are just as bright and talented as ever, but something has occurred which will prevent you from generating any income, perhaps for a long time. Your lifestyle is likely to undergo an irreversable change of altitude.

You can and will survive this threat!

When you are waiting for the axe to fall, any preparation at all will help. The first step is to be emotionally prepared, the second step is to be financially prepared. If you are not emotionally prepared, you will find good reasons not to do anything until it is too late. If you make the necessary changes, you will go on to new and better jobs with a renewed sense of worth. If you don't, you won't. It is as brutally simple as that.

I wrote Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day to help anyone through the trauma of being fired or laid off. TIP: Reading it before termination is far better than reading it afterwards.

If you take the time to read page 52 and continue for awhile, you may find the inspiration you need to look for a better job. If you want help finding the Ideal Job, go to page 124. if you want to feel better immediately, read the whole book.

There are better jobs waiting for you, believe me. All you need to know is how to find them. This book will help you, but you have to read it!

Prepare yourself for the realities of 21st century employment so you can make decisions that lead to a less stressful corporate career. Your corporate career can be followed by stable and profitable long-term self-employment if you plan for it early enough. More people are doing that every day. It may be your turn soon.

The illustration is The Layoff, a tarot card from the Silicon Valley Tarot by Thomas Scoville.

Note: This post was revised several times. The subject matter is so intense that it affected my ability to write. Thanks for bearing with me.

Tag: layoffs

Comments

[Carrie]

Just popping in to say I needed some fun so I've created a blog for that purpose. It might not interest you but I wanted to let you know about it.

Hope you're having an enjoyable weekend :-) We've got a humid heatwave happening, much like a lot of others. Makes me miss snow! lol

[eddie brown]

Is your book "Danger Quicksand" still available to download ?

[David St Lawrence]

Eddie,

Danger Quicksand is available as a paperback with free shipping for $19.95. It is also available as a download in PDA format and in PDF format.

The page references in the above post refer to the paperback version only. The free downloads are pre-press versions of the book which were made available while the paperback was being pronted.

You will find the free downloads by visiting the Bent Crow Press Site and looking at the left side bar. You can also also go to the free download post directly.

In either case, you can also order the paperback for immediate shipment by going to the site and clicking on the Order Now buttons in the right sidebar.

[Kim B]

Thank you for that post David.

This is a serious matter. It is easy to get lulled into complacency when you are well-paid and the everyday demands of your job take most of your time and energy. My company just outsourced its entire IT department. Three months ago no one had a clue it was going to happen. For those of us who are over 50, it may well be a life-changing event.

If you are over 40 and need something to wake you up, read the cover story in the May 23 issue of Fortune: “50 and Fired.” If you are in IT, read the June 13 cover story in Information Week: “Career Anxiety.” The prospect of losing your home because you have been out of work so long is chilling. What is happening is real. I know.

[Kim B]

Correction. Make that the May 16 issue of Fortune. Sorry.

[IB Bill]

What's the "hot suitcase trick"

[David St Lawrence]

Oops! Sorry!

At least one place I worked referred to back-to-back service trips as doing the hot suitcase trick. You would arrive home on the red-eye, for example and would be sent out on another emergency service call within 24 hours.

We would just have time to pull the dirty laundry out of the suitcase and repack it before leaving again.

When this is happening, it is usually a result of incomplete designs, shoddy final testing, and frantic management pressure to ship in order to make the quarterly numbers. When this is going on, you will also hear the phrase, "Ship it anyway! We'll fix it in the field!"