How to Get Back on Track After a Layoff

Got made redundant? Join the club nobody wanted to join. This article is your antidote to panic, despair, and the terrifying urge to apply for 127 jobs before breakfast. Inside: one executive’s spectacular unravelling (and rebuilding), five takeaways that make a difference, unconventional book recommendations that won’t bore you senseless, and practical wisdom on navigating a career change without losing your marbles. Pour yourself something lovely and settle in, this might be exactly what you need.

Five Key Takeaways

1. Treat your career like a business you own, not a job someone bestows upon you. You’re the CEO now, darling, act like it.
2. Resistance isn’t the enemy, it’s information. That tightness in your chest when you think about your old role? Pay attention to it.
3. Your transferable skills are more extensive than you think. Leadership is leadership, whether you’re managing spreadsheets or managing meaning.
4. The gap between jobs is not empty space. It’s the fertile void where transformation happens, if you let it.
5. Community beats willpower every single time. You cannot think your way out of this alone, nor should you try.

The Unexpected Gift of Being Shown the Door

Let me tell you about the worst Tuesday of Alistair Jackson’s life.

The meeting was scheduled for 2pm. He knew, the way you know when you smell smoke, that something wasn’t right. The HR director’s face had that particular sheen of professional sympathy, like expensive moisturiser applied too thickly. His manager couldn’t meet his eyes. There was a box of tissues on the table, which felt both thoughtful and insulting, as though his emotional collapse had been pre-approved and budgeted for.

“We’re restructuring,” they said. “It’s not personal,” they said. “Your position is being eliminated,” they said.

Alistair heard the words through a sort of underwater distance. He’d been with the firm for fourteen years. Fourteen years of strategy documents and quarterly reviews and that one ghastly team-building exercise involving clay and far too much earnestness. He’d missed his daughter’s school plays for this place. He’d taken calls on holiday. He’d believed, stupidly, that loyalty mattered.

He nodded. He signed things. He shook hands because that’s what you do when your professional life is being dismantled in a beige conference room that smells faintly of desperation and filter coffee.

Then he walked to his car, sat in the driver’s seat, and absolutely nothing happened. His hands simply refused to start the ignition. It was as though his entire nervous system had gone on strike in solidarity.

That’s when the rage arrived. Rage at them, obviously. But also rage at himself for not seeing it coming, for trusting that his performance reviews meant something, for caring so bloody much. The anger sat in his throat like a stone he couldn’t swallow.

By Wednesday morning, the rage had given way to something worse: panic. Alistair found himself at his kitchen table at 5am, laptop glowing, firing off applications to anything remotely relevant. Director of Operations in Manchester? Sure. Strategy Lead in Edinburgh? Why not. He barely read the job descriptions. He was a man possessed, scrolling through LinkedIn with the desperate energy of someone trying to outrun his own obsolescence.

His wife, Sarah, found him like that, wild-eyed and unshowered, still in yesterday’s clothes.

“What are you doing?” she asked, though the answer was painfully obvious.

“Getting back on track,” he said, not looking up from the screen.

“Darling,” she said gently, sitting down beside him, “that track just ran out. Maybe it’s time to find a new one.”

He couldn’t hear her. Not yet. He was too busy drowning.

By Friday, Alistair had applied for forty-seven positions. He’d received three automated rejection emails and a crushing wall of silence from everyone else. That’s when the shame arrived. Shame that he was fifty-two and suddenly unemployed. Shame that he’d have to tell his friends. Shame that his identity, so carefully constructed over decades, had been dismantled in a twenty-minute meeting.

His daughter, Mia, seventeen and ruthlessly perceptive, caught him staring blankly at his phone that evening.

“Dad, you look terrible.”

“Thanks, sweetheart. Really helping.”

“I’m serious. When did you last eat?”

He couldn’t remember. The kitchen, usually full of Sarah’s cooking smells and Mia’s chaotic after-school presence, felt foreign. Everything felt foreign. He’d become a stranger in his own life.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he admitted, the words falling out before he could stop them.

Mia sat down across from him, her expression softening. “Maybe stop trying to get back to where you were. That place doesn’t exist anymore.”

Teenagers, it turns out, can be devastatingly wise.

That weekend, Sarah dragged Alistair to a storytelling circle a friend had mentioned. He protested, naturally. He wasn’t some artist or creative type. He was a business professional. What possible use could sitting around listening to stories be?

But Sarah had that look, the one that meant resistance was futile, so he went.

The circle met in a draughty community centre that smelled of old books and optimism. Twelve strangers sat in uncomfortable plastic chairs, and a facilitator with kind eyes invited them to share. Not their CVs or their accomplishments, but their actual stories. Their fears. Their losses. Their hopes.

Alistair listened. A woman who’d lost her marketing job talked about finally starting the pottery business she’d dreamed of for twenty years. A man who’d been made redundant from banking spoke about retraining as a counsellor. Their voices, hesitant at first, grew stronger as they spoke. They weren’t reciting LinkedIn profiles. They were offering up pieces of themselves, raw and real.

When his turn came, Alistair surprised himself by speaking. He told them about the beige conference room. About the box of tissues. About the rage and the panic and the shame. About being fifty-two and terrified that his best years were behind him.

Nobody offered solutions. Nobody told him it would all work out. They just listened. And somehow, in that listening, something loosened in his chest.

He kept coming back.

Week after week, Alistair showed up to the circle. He began to notice things. The way a story could hold multiple truths at once. The way vulnerability wasn’t weakness but a kind of courage. The way meaning could exist outside of job titles and salary packages.

In one session, the facilitator asked them to complete this sentence: “The career change I’m resisting most is…”

Alistair wrote: “Admitting that I don’t want to go back to corporate life. Admitting that I’ve been performing success instead of living it. Admitting that being made redundant might be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He stared at the words, shocked by his own honesty.

Three months later, Alistair launched a consulting practice helping mid-career professionals navigate transitions. Not the glossy, CV-polishing kind. The messy, soul-searching, what-actually-matters kind. He combined his business acumen with what he’d learned in the storytelling circles: that transformation happens through narrative, through community, through being brave enough to sit with uncertainty.

His income wasn’t what it used to be, not at first. But when he woke up in the morning, that stone in his throat was gone. He could breathe. He could laugh. He could taste his food again.

The redundancy hadn’t destroyed his career. It had cracked it open, letting light in where there’d only been the artificial glow of fluorescent office lighting.

“You know what the strangest part is?” Alistair told the storytelling circle six months into his new life. “I spent fourteen years building a career I thought I wanted. It took losing it to discover what I actually needed.”

Someone in the circle nodded. Someone else wiped their eyes. And Alistair realised, not for the first time, that the most powerful thing we can do for each other is simply tell the truth about what it means to be human, to lose things, to find ourselves in the wreckage.

The Deeper Truth About Career Change After Redundancy

Here’s what nobody tells you about being made redundant: it’s not actually about the job. It’s about identity. It’s about the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are and what you’re worth. When that job disappears, so does the scaffolding holding up your sense of self. The experience often reveals that we’ve failed to treat our careers like businesses we’re in charge of, waiting instead for someone else to make the sale, to grant the promotion, to validate our worth.

The panic that follows redundancy is your psyche trying to rebuild that scaffolding as quickly as possible, using the same old blueprints. But what if the blueprints were wrong? What if you weren’t meant to reconstruct what was, but to create something entirely new?

Career change shouldn’t be an impulse decision driven solely by the trauma of redundancy. Yet it also shouldn’t be dismissed simply because it feels terrifying. The question worth asking isn’t “How do I get back to where I was?” but rather “Who am I becoming, and what does that person need?”

The CEO of Your Own Career

When you shift your mentality from employee to owner, from worker to CEO of your own career, your world suddenly looks different. Employees wait to be chosen. CEOs make strategic decisions. Employees feel victimised by circumstances. CEOs analyse market conditions and pivot accordingly.

This isn’t about adopting some aggressive, hustling mentality. It’s about recognising that your career belongs to you, not to any employer, no matter how many years you’ve given them. The moment you understand this, redundancy stops being something that happened to you and becomes information you can work with.

The Wisdom of Resistance

Your body knows things your mind hasn’t caught up to yet. That dread you felt on Sunday evenings before work? That wasn’t weakness or ingratitude. That was data. The relief that sometimes accompanies redundancy, even when it’s mixed with fear? Also data.

Pay attention to where you feel resistance. Not the surface resistance of “change is scary” but the deeper resistance of “this path is wrong for me.” That’s not something to overcome through willpower. That’s your soul’s GPS redirecting you.

Transferable Skills and Hidden Assets

The process of career change requires taking a self-inventory and identifying transferable skills that apply well to new industries. But transferable skills aren’t just technical abilities. They’re also your capacity for resilience, your ability to build relationships, your skill at navigating uncertainty.

You’ve spent years developing expertise that extends far beyond your job description. You know how to read people, manage complexity, solve problems, create meaning from chaos. These capabilities don’t expire when you leave a particular industry. They’re portable, valuable, and often more relevant than you realise.

The Power of Not Knowing

Western culture despises uncertainty. We’re supposed to have five-year plans and clear trajectories. But the space between identities, between one career and another, is sacred. It’s the fertile void where actual transformation happens.

Many people who’ve experienced redundancy find that the layoff sends their careers in new, very positive directions that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. But this only works if you resist the urge to fill the void immediately with the first thing that’ll have you.

Give yourself permission to not know. To explore. To try things on and discard them. To be bewildered and curious rather than certain and closed. This isn’t procrastination or avoidance. It’s the work.

Community as Compass

You cannot think your way through a career change alone. You need mirrors, people who can reflect back to you what they see, who can challenge your limiting stories, who can hold space for your grief and your becoming.

This is where storytelling circles, coaching cohorts, mastermind groups, and genuine friendships become essential. Not networking in the transactional sense, but connection in the human sense. People who’ve walked this path and can say, “Yes, that’s exactly how it feels. And yes, it gets better. And no, you’re not broken.”

Building out a network of people who can offer perspective becomes crucial, particularly when transitioning to a new field where you may need to develop connections from scratch. But more than connections, you need witnesses. People who see you as more than your job title, who can remind you of your worth when you’ve forgotten it.

Further Reading: Three Books

“The Art of Possibility” by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

This isn’t a career book, which is precisely why it belongs on this list. The Zanders, a psychotherapist and a conductor, explore how we create our own constraints through the stories we tell. Particularly relevant is their concept of “giving an A” to yourself and others, stepping into possibility rather than scarcity. When you’ve been made redundant, your brain defaults to scarcity: “I’m not enough. There aren’t enough jobs. I don’t have enough time.” This book gently but firmly reframes that narrative. It’s about seeing the world as full of possibility rather than full of threats, which is precisely the mindset shift needed for genuine career change rather than desperate job-seeking.

“Let Your Life Speak” by Parker Palmer

Palmer, a Quaker educator and activist, writes about vocation as listening to your life rather than imposing your will upon it. He shares his own story of repeatedly trying to become someone he wasn’t, experiencing breakdown, and eventually discovering that authenticity requires paying attention to what gives you life rather than what you think should give you life. This slim book dismantles the myth that career change is about force and willpower. Instead, it’s about discernment, about noticing where you come alive and where you wither. For executives and entrepreneurs used to making things happen through sheer determination, this is revolutionary, challenging wisdom.

“Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes” by William Bridges

Bridges distinguishes between change (external circumstances) and transition (the internal reorientation that follows). Most career change advice focuses on the former: update your CV, learn new skills, network strategically. Bridges focuses on the latter: the psychological and emotional journey from ending through the neutral zone to new beginning. This matters because layoffs and career changes can make you feel as if you’re not in control of your situation, but being proactive early on about managing both financial and mental health helps you work through the stress. Understanding that you’re in a predictable psychological process, not just a logistical challenge, makes the whole experience less terrifying and more navigable.

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Words from a Circle

“I came to the storytelling circle three weeks after being made redundant from a role I’d held for eleven years. I was certain I just needed to ‘get over it’ and move on quickly. But listening to others share their experiences of loss and transformation, I realised I was grieving, not just job-hunting. The facilitator created a space where it was safe to admit I had no idea what came next, where not knowing was honoured rather than rushed past. That permission to pause, to feel, to explore without a predetermined outcome, changed everything. Six months later, I’m in a completely different field, doing work that lights me up. But none of that would have happened if I’d just tried to recreate what I’d lost. The storytelling circle taught me that career change isn’t about finding the next job. It’s about finding the next version of yourself.”

— Michael T., Former Finance Director, now Social Enterprise Founder

Five Essential FAQs

How long should I give myself before accepting that a career change is necessary?

There’s no universal timeline, but pay attention to your body and your patterns. If you’re applying desperately for anything remotely similar to what you left and feeling increasingly hollow with each application, that’s information. If you find yourself energised by completely different possibilities, even if they seem impractical, that’s also information. Generally, give yourself at least three months to move through the initial shock and grief before making major decisions. Not three months of paralysis, but three months of exploration, conversation, and honest self-assessment.

What if I can’t afford to make a career change right now?

Career change doesn’t have to mean immediate, dramatic transformation. It requires building a long-term strategy that keeps you focused and moving forward. Start by identifying what aspects of your previous work drained you and what gave you energy. Then look for roles that offer more of the latter, even in your current field. Simultaneously, develop new skills in areas that genuinely interest you. This isn’t about abandoning financial responsibility. It’s about strategic movement towards work that sustains you rather than depletes you. Sometimes the bridge job isn’t the destination, it’s the funding mechanism for getting there.

How do I explain a career change to potential employers without sounding flaky or desperate?

Frame it as strategic evolution, not retreat. Taking a self-inventory to identify transferable skills that apply well to a new industry allows you to tell a coherent story about why this move makes sense. Focus on what you’re moving towards, not what you’re running from. For example: “My experience leading teams in the financial sector developed my ability to navigate complexity and build trust under pressure. I’m now applying those capabilities to healthcare because I’m passionate about improving systems that directly impact people’s wellbeing.” That’s not flaky. That’s purposeful.

What if I’m too old to start over?

You’re not starting over. You’re bringing decades of experience, wisdom, and capability to something new. People in their mid-fifties have successfully transitioned to entirely new careers, including launching consulting practices and starting training businesses. Age is only a liability if you treat it as one. Reframe it: you have the financial literacy, emotional intelligence, and professional credibility that takes decades to develop. That’s not obsolescence. That’s valuable expertise being redirected.

How do I know if this is the right career change or just another mistake?

You don’t know. Nobody does. Certainty is a myth we sell ourselves. But you can move towards more alignment by asking better questions: Does this energise me or deplete me? Does this reflect my values or betray them? Am I doing this because I think I should or because I genuinely want to? Does this use my strengths and talents? Career change isn’t about finding the perfect, permanent answer. It’s about taking the next right step, learning from it, and adjusting accordingly. Trust your capacity to navigate, not your ability to predict.

Where You Go From Here

You’re reading this because something ended. Perhaps violently, perhaps with surprising relief, perhaps with a confusing mixture of both. Either way, you’re in the space between stories, between the career you had and the one you haven’t discovered yet.

This space is uncomfortable. Our culture offers you exactly two scripts: panic and apply for everything, or “follow your passion” into reckless impracticality. Neither is particularly helpful.

What if there’s a third way? One that honours both your legitimate need for financial stability and your soul’s deep requirement for meaning. One that treats career change not as emergency or indulgence but as a thoughtful process of becoming.

You have capabilities and wisdom that don’t disappear when a job does. You have a lifetime of accumulated skills, insights, and relationships. You have the capacity to navigate uncertainty, even when it feels terrifying. You have the right to work that doesn’t drain the life from you.

The redundancy wasn’t the end. It was the crack in the structure, letting light in. What grows in that light is up to you.

You don’t need to have it all figured out today. You just need to take the next kind, honest step. Then the next one. Then the next.

And you don’t need to do it alone.

An Invitation to Purposeful Change

If Alistair’s story resonated, if you recognised yourself in the panic and the resistance and the desperate desire to just get back to normal, you’re not alone. Thousands of accomplished professionals find themselves in exactly this position, asking exactly these questions.

The Purpose Protocol online courses were created precisely for this moment. Not generic career coaching that treats you like a widget to be repackaged, but deep, transformative work that helps you identify what actually matters to you and build a career around that clarity.

Through a combination of practical strategy (yes, you’ll update your CV and learn to articulate your value) and deeper exploration (discovering what work genuinely aligns with who you are), these courses guide you through the career change process with both rigour and compassion. You’ll join a community of fellow travellers who understand that professional transition isn’t just about finding the next role, it’s about finding the next version of yourself. The curriculum includes storytelling practices that help you process what’s ending and imagine what’s beginning, practical frameworks for identifying transferable skills and uncovering hidden opportunities, and ongoing support from facilitators who’ve walked this path themselves.

This isn’t about quick fixes or false promises. It’s about doing the real work of career change with people who genuinely care about your flourishing, not just your employment status. If you’re ready to stop running from what ended and start walking purposefully towards what’s next, the Purpose Protocols are waiting for you.

P.S. Just a quick reminder: If you would like some support while you work through a protocol, you can book one or more consultations with me (Margaretha Montagu) for inspiration, motivation and accountability (at additional cost). Send an email to OpenLockedDoors@gmail.com to find out more. People often book a consultation at the end of the course, to help them implement what they have learned. Also, if at any time during this protocol you get stuck, email me at the email address above.

Stress destroys Lives. To find out what you can do to safeguard your sanity by taking my insight-giving quiz, subscribe to my mailing list.

References

Measuring the True Impact of Job Loss on Future Earnings Pawel Krolikowski, Senior Research Economist 08.10.2017ISSN 2163-3738 EC 2017-11

Brand, J. E. (2015). The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 359.