Redundancy
With news of redundancies and layoffs at Twitter, and similar news from other tech and EdTech businesses, I wanted to let you all know it happens and you will recover. Here are my experiences with redundancy.
I worked during my A-levels and degree where, in 1996, I was lucky to go straight into paid employment. Since then I’ve worked in a number of industries, but I’ve been in education since 2007.
I say this as I wanted to highlight 4 instances where I was made redundant. Yes, in 26 years I’ve been made redundant four times, each very different from the others, and at different times of my life. The impact of each instance varied but there is always an impact when you’re made redundant, whether you have dependents or not.
- To be clear, this is a post about my experiences with redundancy, not that I have been made redundant. Apologies if this was made clear when I originally posted.
1999: Enterprise Oil, Senior Petrophysical Data Manager.
My first experience of redundancy was aged 26. The oil industry was going through hard times and Enterprise Oil was looking to shed in the region of 100 staff from their +800 workforce and asked for volunteers. At this time I was living back in Bournemouth and commuting daily to London, and not enjoying it. I wasn’t comfortable in the role and I had been invited to join the team developing the new departmental intranet site. I was learning HTML code at the time of the DotCom boom. This was an area of development, and the lure of the internet and web design was somewhere I wanted to explore. The promise of a generous redundancy package and a re-training budget made it an easy decision to make and I accepted it without much consideration.
Impact – I left with a very generous redundancy package which helped go some way to help pay for my wedding and honeymoon that year. Professionally I used the time I had left at work and the training budget to get some Microsoft and web design qualifications, which I took to my next role, this time outside the oil & gas industry.
2003: Webtastic, Senior Web Designer & Internet Consultant
A difficult time for me this time around – the business was great and I worked with some amazing people, but the future just wasn’t as rosy as we wanted it to be. From the redundancy of Enterprise Oil I landed this role as the first employee of this web design agency in 1999. For four years we worked damn hard and developed a lot of class-leading websites for communities and professional organisations and societies (our strapline was ‘connecting your community’) using a bespoke community, discussion-based web system. In 2003 the business was restructured and the focus changed. The end came quickly and the business was split up. At its peak, we’d built an agency with some 20 staff over a couple of sites, but in the end, there were just a few of us left from the core team to be made redundant. Looking back it wasn’t a total surprise, but that didn’t minimise the impact. Not in any way.
Impact – This time it wasn’t just about me and my career, I had my wife to think of. We had the mortgage, loans, etc and we needed to make sure we could keep paying for it. Luckily my wife was on good money as a primary school teacher. I decided to try some freelance, self-employment web design at this time while having a few part-time roles. It wasn’t great, but this time was perhaps the most satisfying time in my professional career – I worked with some amazing people, helped their businesses grow with a new website or online portal, advised on and was involved in e-commerce and development, both locally and internationally (my further client was in Australia). By the time I settled back into full-time employment I had been self-employed for three years.
2018: EasyCare Academy, Manager Product & Proposition (Head of Digital Education)
This was the biggest crash I had from a redundancy. I left a solid and stable role at Warwick Business School to join this start-up. As a first-to-market global healthcare & education business, I and others worked hard to build the tech and organisation to a position where it could be launched to a waiting (and often impatient) client base. We were in the dark about the state of the finances until news of redundancies hit. I was on a family break when I found out, literally boarding the plane home at Innsbruck airport. None of us knew of this until it was too late and we’d worked without pay for a number of months. Many of us stayed as long as we could, believing we could rescue the situation, being told it was something we could rescue. Ultimately we were left with our own mounting debts; I was not as hard hit as others, but it still knocked me hard, both professionally and financially. I made a decision to leave a stable job for this, and I thought I understood the risks but I did not think those risks would affect my family and my own health so much. A risk to join a start-up is one you think of as a professional risk, not one that will hit you personally – emotionally and financially. Since then I’ve been far more cautious and, honestly, I lost a lot of my confidence at this time. Other experiences have had a negative effect, but nothing like this one.
Impact – Probably the worst experience, and the biggest impact. This time, unlike the two before, I was the main earner in the house, with school-age kids. The months I went without being paid whilst I finished and looked for a new role drained what savings we had. I am lucky I have a family behind me who could help out, and if it wasn’t for them the years since this would have been so very different. I can’t emphasise it enough, if you are in a similar position, you must look to your family, friends, and network if you can. This isn’t about the money, but about staying positive, staying active, and believing that it can and will get better, even if you can’t see the how or when yet. You can’t keep this one to yourself, it’s too big and it’ll eat you up – once you’re on the downward spiral it’s even harder to find your way out.
For me, LinkedIn and Twitter networks were my saviours (professionally). Without the care and help that was given, unconditionally and so generously by these wonderful people, I would not have found the jobs and roles I looked at and applied for. Yes, job boards and agencies were helpful, but it was the network that pointed me in the right direction to start with. Thank you!
2018: Keypath Education, Instructional Designer
I was lucky enough that my network (thank you, Emma King!) helped me out and I secured this temporary role with Keypath. Sadly, they were also going through some restructures and downsizing. So, a month after starting, I was once again on the lookout for another opportunity.
Impact – I can’t describe the hole that opened up in front of me when I realised it was happening. Again. The care and help that Emma and colleagues at Keypath gave me were unparalleled and made this experience far easier to handle than the others before. I was able to stay on a couple of extra months, thus still earning, and I was allowed some time to hunt for and apply/interview for new jobs at the same time as completing my work for them. The gap between Keypath and joining Coventry was thankfully only 5 weeks, but it was looking a whole lot more for a while there, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if bills and mortgages couldn’t be paid. I did, however, start the process of putting the house on the market, and had been in contact with my banks to explore options, I was getting prepared for the worse, even if I didn’t see how it could get worse.
I know. I’ve been extremely lucky in how these four instances of redundancies played out for me. At the time they were the worst experiences of my personal and professional life, but I got through it.
If you are on the receiving end of redundancy, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter (I do still check it every now and then), I’d be happy to have a chat, even if it’s just to talk crap about the weather and the price of 2nd hand Lego!
