After redundancy: What do you REALLY want?

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I said in the previous post (Redundancy figures up) that one of the crucial issues at the moment is that government initiatives and most folk’s focus are solely around finding people jobs.


The big all round problem/ challenge/ hurdle/ whatever you want to call it with this is: What if no company is hiring employees with your skills for any decent length of time, let alone on a supposedly ‘permanent’ basis in your area or where you can get to and from or relocate to?

Just a few things

If the old ways of business aren’t working (and they don’t seem to be doing too well in many ways right now) then maybe now presents an opportunity to consider being in business for yourself without a whole load of upfront investment being needed. The old monetary barrier to entry and isn’t really an issue any more.

The Internet is the great leveler and the fact you’re reading this means you have access to it :-) . Apparently if the Internet were a country it would be the third biggest country in the world – and we’re all its inhabitants!

There has never been such on demand armchair access to so much free information from experts around the world – in the form of articles, white papers, forums, free newsletters and ezines. Nor has it ever been easier to engage and interact with potential customers, also from around the world if that’s your target market, and discover real needs that they’ll pay to be met.

Experience, knowledge, ability to execute: Where is your expertise?
Did you enjoy your last job? Let’s rephrase that: How much did you enjoy it? Grade it all the way from dream job to “I had to drag myself into it every day”. What was good and what was bad about it? What would you want more of in your working day? What would you want less of?

What would your ideal day, week, month or year look like? Who would you be with and what would you be doing? If your answer is lying on a beach… fair enough, even if, in reality that might get a bit boring once the novelty has worn off – what are you going to do to earn the money to finance that lifestyle?

What service could you offer at and excel at that recipients would be happy to pay your price for? How could you serve people; create that value that people want, need and will pay for: how could you channel your unique talents?

We’re entering a couple of weeks of festivities that signal a slow down for many industries, especially in the western world. There will be odd times when you can concentrate on you and how you want your future to be.

If you’ve been made redundant and are considering your options, our book ‘Redundancy – Survive and Thrive!’ could be one of the best ever Christmas presents! Why not treat yourself?

Filed Under: redundancy advice, redundancy help, redundancy uk Tagged With: , , , ,

Redundancy figures up

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Latest government figures just out show redundancies for the last quarter are up to 158,000 see Office for National Statistics. This is the first increase in redundancies since the three months to April and apparently took city economists, who had been expecting a 15,000 drop, by surprise.

The graph on the near right shows the rise in unemployment and the one on the far right shows the fall in employment: In other words, the different sides of the same coin.

The extra numbers out of work are fuelled by public sector cuts and take the total of unemployed to over 2.5 million (though Scotland bucked the overall UK trend, with unemployment falling there by 5,000). There’s an article in The Guardian that tells more, so you can nip over there if you’re interested in more details.

One of the things I picked up on and take issue with is David Cameron’s comment that: “We must do everything we can to help people into a job”

Hang on:

The Public Sector is cutting back 330,000 jobs over four years and analysts believe that weak job creation in the private sector will only lead to more unemployment.

“In many cases, businesses are still too cautious about future prospects to aggressively expand headcount, especially ahead of a year in which the VAT rise and the effect of soaring commodity prices will squeeze households” is the view of Charles Davis, managing economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

So where are these jobs going to magically come from, David?

It’s probably pretty important to say here that I’m not being all gloom, doom and despondency. It’s more that, in an economy like this people are probably going to think a darned sight more creatively than they have in quite some time.

And the first thing I’d like to say to government, Response to Redundancy contractors and the recruitment industry in general is this:

Getting somebody into a job that only needs to last for 13 weeks to count as a success, look good on the figures and earn the Response to Redundancy contractors, Recruitment Agencies and Recruitment Consultancies their fees can’t be the real aim. That will just play havoc with the big picture of what’s really going on and, worse, play havoc with people’s lives.

The aim should surely be to help individuals find ways to legitimately earn a decent, sustainable living and not penalise them overall financially when they take themselves off the dole.

And maybe that means approaching the whole ‘job’ seeking activity with a much more open mind.

Maybe take a radical thought?

How “safe” is it for an individual to put his or her weekly, monthly and annual earning potential into the hands of one employer? An individual who can turn round with little warning and say: “I’m sorry, your services aren’t needed any more.”

Maybe some people would prefer not to have all their eggs in one basket next time around. That doesn’t necessarily mean ‘setting up a business’ in the old sense of the word. What do you think? What alternative options could you come up with that you’d want to look into?

What have others had a go at that appeal to you?

Filed Under: redundancy advice, redundancy help, redundancy uk, voluntary redundancy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Response to Redundancy

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When I first started posting on redundancy here back in March 2009, I couldn’t find any government help that referred specifically to those who had recently been made redundant or those who’d who’d voluntarily left a job and only been out of work for a short time.

Back then it seemed that the government agency and its contractors’ help was concentrated on those people who had been out of a job for whatever reason for more than six months. I believe the thinking at that time was that the majority of people out of a job would find themselves another position reasonably swiftly, using the traditional means: Responding to job adverts in the media, going via recruitment agencies/ consultants or Jobcentre plus.

That was probably a reasonable approach with limited resources when there were comparable jobs around to be had. But nobody in government seemed to be taking into account or acknowledging that we were entering exceptional times.

One chap in the recruitment agency industry posted about Response to Redundancy, which seemed to be a new government funded initiative to help those that had lost their jobs get back into work, in August of 2009. I admit that I only came across that reference recently and I don’t believe the scheme existed existed when I originally wrote the book five months earlier. The main concerns in this guy’s post were these:

Many providers of the service (contractors from charities to commercial organisations) were having problems finding candidates to take them up on it.

Not enough people knew of its existence: The providers were being paid an amount on sign up of participants but the lion’s share of government money was paid out largely on results. The profits weren’t huge per individual placed in a job and the providers were those who’d won contracts for specific geographical areas and so were restricted to where they could ‘tout their trade’. So they relied on central government advertising the scheme on their behalf…

It’s 16 months on since then and another round of government contracts have been awarded in the Response to Redundancy initiative so what’s on offer and how successful is the scheme proving to be?

The Response to Redundancy help on offer seems to vary from one-day workshops on subjects like CV writing, interview techniques and networking tips, to more in-depth courses lasting several weeks. In some areas support ceases once a job’s been found whereas in others it’s ongoing.

I’m not knocking any of these: they can all help (and each features in my own book ‘Redundancy: Survive and Thrive’ and the workshops, courses and programmes we run). But they’re only a part of what you’re likely to need. And, similar in some ways to the NHS, what’s available in real delivery terms of Response to Redundancy to individuals on the receiving end seems to be something of a post code lottery.

Tip: If you’ve not yet been introduced by your Jobcentre Plus to what’s on offer in your area: Type ‘Response to Redundancy’ plus ‘your town’ into Google and suss out what’s available. Arm yourself with that for your next Jobcentre Plus appointment and tell them what workshops or courses you want to go on!

Please let us know about good Response to Redundancy contract providers. Share wherever is good for folk to go for help.

PS Look out for the next post for ideas on different thinking that just might get you a lot further than traditional thinking…

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