I am Generation X. I have watched the world from the workforce through the 1998 emerging markets crisis, the dot-com collapse, September 11 — I was in the United States when it happened — the 2008 financial crisis, a global pandemic, and now this. Each time, the same pattern: something structural shifts, and people pay for it with their jobs.
The first layoff I witnessed up close was in telecommunications in Pittsburgh. I was junior. I came in one morning and the cubicles around me were empty. People I had sat next to the day before were gone — walked out by security, box in hand, before most of us had arrived. The next morning I parked my car. My space was at the very back of the lot — junior staff, furthest from the building. But the spaces closer in were empty now. I could park next to the CEO if I wanted. I remember standing there thinking that was the strangest, saddest promotion I had ever received. Nobody sent a congratulations email.
That image has stayed with me for over twenty years. Not because of what happened to me — I kept my job that time — but because of the weight of it. The weight I felt in my chest walking into a building that was suddenly quieter. The awareness, for the first time, of what it actually means when a company decides that a human being's contribution is no longer required.
I have been on the other side of it too. I have fired people. I have done organisational restructurings. I tried to be fair, to be humane, to handle it with as much dignity as the situation allowed. I was not flawless. Nobody is. But I can tell you that even from that side — especially from that side — you never stop feeling what it costs the person sitting across from you. Because you understand, in a way that spreadsheets cannot capture, what you are actually taking from them. Not just income. The place they spent eight hours a day. The colleagues who became something close to family. The meetings they postponed vacations for. The parties they missed. The version of themselves they showed up as every morning, the one that nobody at home fully sees.
This is what I want to write about honestly. Not the CV tips. Not the networking advice. The thing underneath.
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Something is different about this wave. Not in how layoffs feel — they feel exactly as they always have, which is to say: shocking, personal, and worse than you expected. But in what they mean structurally.
The Industrial Revolution displaced millions of workers too. Handloom weavers, blacksmiths, agricultural labourers — whole categories of skilled human work became uneconomical within a generation. The standard reassurance then, as now, is that new technologies always create more jobs than they destroy. In the long run, historically, this has been true.
The difference this time is that AI is not just automating physical or repetitive work. It is automating cognitive work — analysis, writing, coding, legal review, financial modelling, customer interaction. The jobs that the Industrial Revolution created were largely cognitive. The question nobody can fully answer is: what comes next when that tier is also under pressure?
What we do see emerging is what economists call a K-shaped economy — where capital and the top of the income distribution pull away, while mid-level cognitive labour bears most of the transition cost. The IMF estimates AI is already affecting roughly 40% of global jobs, rising to 60% in advanced economies. Goldman Sachs puts 300 million full-time job equivalents at risk globally from generative AI. The WEF's 2025 Future of Jobs Report projects 92 million jobs displaced and 170 million created by 2030 — a net positive on paper, but a description of a transition that will not feel positive to the people living through it.
Your layoff is not just a personal event. It is happening inside a structural shift that is larger than any single company's decision. Knowing this does not pay your bills. But it might stop you from spending the next six months blaming yourself for something that is partly structural, partly cyclical, and only partly about you.
· · ·
Now the personal part. Because context matters but it does not tell you what to do on Monday morning. What follows is written for three different situations. Find yours.
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Specialist and Manager Level |
You were good at your job. You were part of a team, maybe a culture you believed in. You probably worked harder than required, because that is what people who take pride in their work do. And then one morning a meeting appeared in your calendar with no agenda.
The emotional hit at this level is sharp and specific: betrayal. You believed your contribution was seen and valued. Welcome to the reality of what companies actually are — not families, not communities, not the culture decks they publish. They are economic structures that make decisions based on cost and strategy. When the calculation changes, the people change. This is not cynicism. It is accuracy. And accepting it — really accepting it, not just saying the words — is the first and most important thing.
ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — has one core insight that applies here more than anywhere: you cannot think your way out of pain by arguing with it. The anger, the shame, the confusion about your worth — these do not respond to logic. They respond to being acknowledged and then not given all of your attention. You accept that this happened. You do not accept that it defines you. Those are two different things.
Accept the package they offer, but know you can negotiate. Most people do not, because the situation feels humiliating enough and they want it to end. But companies expect negotiation — on notice periods, outplacement support, reference terms. Do not threaten, do not bluster, and be very careful about involving lawyers at this stage. This is important: legal advice sounds reassuring but it can pull you into a process that costs more than it recovers. Even if you win, the legal fees, the months of waiting, and the emotional cost can leave you with less than the original offer — and a reference situation that is now complicated. Lawyers are the right call only if you have genuinely decided to go to court, not as a negotiating tactic. Negotiate calmly yourself on specific terms — notice period, reference language, outplacement support. Get everything in writing. Then move on.
Give yourself two to four weeks before aggressively searching. The applications you send in the first week after a layoff are almost always worse than the ones you send after you have had time to think clearly.
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Director and Senior Leader Level |
This one is harder. You are dealing with two simultaneous losses. The first is internal: the question of what this means about your judgement, your value, your place in the hierarchy you spent fifteen or twenty years climbing. The second is external — a lifestyle, a set of expectations, a social identity partially constructed around your seniority. The company car. The travel. The club membership. The school fees. The expense account that made certain things feel normal that were actually just subsidised by your employer.
There is also the complexity of what you were managing. Your team. People who depended on you, who you may have recruited, who you were in the middle of protecting or developing. The guilt about them is real and should not be dismissed. I know this from both sides.
I was once the youngest director at a company where two gentlemen fifteen years my senior were also in senior roles. When one of them was let go from a major mobile operator — a company he had given years to — someone told me he went outside and ran down the street, crying. I was young. I remember thinking: why would an adult do something like that? What is this reaction? It seemed almost childish to me at the time.
Many years passed. I understand it now completely. He was not crying for the money. He was not crying for the title. He was crying because he lost the person he had spent his entire adult life building. The identity he had shaped — through decisions, sacrifices, relationships, results — was gone in a few cold words or a single email. That is not a small thing. That is not something a grown man should be embarrassed about. That is the real weight of what a layoff takes from you when it takes it at this level.
Same first rule: accept. Then do something that sounds simple but is actually one of the hardest things at this level — separate your identity from your title. You were a director. That was a role you performed, excellently, inside a particular structure. It was not who you are. The proof is that the title is gone and you are still here, with the same capability that got you there.
Your social status will not collapse the way you fear. The private school, the lifestyle — these feel like identity, but the people who matter will not withdraw because your title changed. The ones who do were never actually close. What will genuinely suffer is your sense of self if you try to maintain a lifestyle your income no longer supports. Start reducing slowly and deliberately, before pressure forces you to do it rapidly.
Give yourself at least twelve to eighteen months of financial runway that covers your actual current lifestyle — not the lifestyle you plan to reduce to. Calculate it honestly. It is uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
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C-Level |
You already know most of what I could say. You have sat on the other side of these conversations. You have seen the board dynamics, the consultant recommendations, the moment when the calculation shifted. You know, intellectually, that it is never entirely personal.
And yet. It still hits.
Because at this level you have usually built something. A team, a direction, a set of results that were an expression of capability you spent decades developing. Having that ended by a board decision or a structural reorganisation does not feel like a business event. It feels like a verdict. It is not. But that distinction takes time to feel true rather than just intellectually accepted.
Two things specifically for this level. First: get legal support before you sign anything. At C-level, the separation package is a negotiation — the non-compete scope, the non-disparagement terms, the vesting schedule, the reference language. This may be the last significant corporate income event of your career. Treat it accordingly.
Second: some of you were built for this — always connected, always ready for the next seat. You know who you are. Your network has a half-life — connections that are warm today will cool if you disappear for eighteen months. Move.
And some of you — like me — may find that the next corporate seat is not actually what you want. That the role ending is also an opening. The butterfly life, as someone once described C-level existence to me, gives you a moment to land somewhere different. If that is where you are, give yourself permission to sit with it before deciding anything. The identity question — who you are without the title — is worth more of your time than the job search right now.
· · ·
Across all three levels, one thing nobody says clearly enough: the grief is real. We give so much to work. Eight hours a day, sometimes more. We postpone holidays. We miss parties. We sit in meetings we will forget within a month and tell ourselves it is important. And then one day it ends, and the question is not just "what do I do next" but "what was all of that for?"
That question deserves an honest answer. Not a LinkedIn post about new beginnings. An honest answer. And you cannot find it if you immediately fill the space with the next application, the next interview, the next version of the same thing.
Feel it first. Then act. In that order.
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This week's insight A layoff is not a verdict on your worth. It is an intersection of your career trajectory with a structural shift that is larger than any individual decision. The empty parking spaces that suddenly appeared next to the CEO — that image has stayed with me for over twenty years. Not because of what it said about the people who were let go. Because of what it said about what we invest in work, and how quietly it can end. Feel the loss. It is real. Then use the space it creates — not to immediately fill the gap, but to look honestly at what was in it. |