Rebuilding your life after redundancy - our 4 point plan
Being made redundant is certainly no picnic and so you need to have a practical approach to surviving the experience and moving on to build a new life for yourself and/or your family. We don’t want to oversimplify the matter, however, there are essentially four basic areas you need to address, in more or less the order we’ve outlined below. This website has been designed to support you to make sensible decisions and find the resources you need to move on as quickly and as successfully as possible. You may also find it useful to buy yourself a copy of my book 'Rebuilding your life after redundancy' which covers these topics, and many more, in far greater depth than we can achieve online. We appreciate that everyone’s situation is different so do please use the following pointers to build a survival plan that works for you.Good luck and happy hunting,
Janet Davies
Founder and editor
www.newlifenetwork.co.uk
Stage 1: Understand how you will support yourself/your family whilst you develop an alternative income stream.
Sorting out your finances is an essential first step. It’s much harder to rebuild your life if you are constantly beset by money worries. Will you be receiving any severance pay? You may need anywhere between 3 to 6 months pay to insulate you before you have secured an alternative income stream. Itemise your outgoings and look for immediate and longer term savings to make it last longer. Have you made an appointment to register with JobCentre Plus? You need do so as soon as possible - claims can’t be made retrospectively, you don’t know how long you will be out of work, and it could take a while to get an appointment to sort out your claim.
You’ll find useful resources and contacts to help you in this stage by clicking on to following links:
Redundancy pay & claiming benefit
Redundancy pay
Claiming state benefits
Managing your finances
Buy the book - Rebuilding your life after redundancy
Coping with redundancy
Stage 2: Identify what that alternative income stream might be.
Have you been offered outplacement counseling by your employers to support you in this stage or not? If you have, make good use of it, if you haven’t, use this website to create your own outplacement programme. Are you a relatively unskilled person without much experience or are you an experienced skilled, professional or managerial person? Is it likely that you will be able to find another job similar to the one you just lost if that’s what you’d like to do? Might you need to be prepared to relocate or up-skill to find a similar position? Might you need/want to do something completely different? Will that require re-training or funding of any kind? How long could that take? Will it involve you setting up your own business or looking for a different job?
You’ll find helpful resources and ideas via these links below:
Outplacement explained
Choosing a new career direction
Great books on career management
Great books for budding entrepreneurs
Free online personality tests
Can career coaching & mentoring help?
Starting your own business
Working freelance
Careers in interim management
Training & education guide
Stage 3: Create your plan to achieve that alternative income stream.
List all the things you’ll need to have in place so you don’t miss out anything important. It will look different if you are job hunting as opposed to setting up a business – it will help to give you useful direction and a sense of achievement as you go into your action stage. Remember the old adage - fail to plan, plan to fail!
You’ll find helpful resources and ideas by following the links throughout these sections:
Find a brilliant new job
Be your own boss
Training & education guide
Stage 4: Implement your plan.
If you are a job hunter, have you prepared a CV that is geared to the kind of job you want and demonstrates to recruiters and employers that you have what it takes to do it well? If you have that CV written, have you researched/registered with all the employers, recruiters and websites appropriate to the type of new job you are looking for? Have you networked with friends, family, colleagues, professional associations etc to look for additional leads? If you have interviews, have you brushed up your interview skills? Are you taking good care of yourself both mentally and physically because job hunting itself can be pretty hard work? Are you pursuing your plan rigorously?
You’ll find more helpful resources by following these links below:
CV Help
How to succeed at job interviews
Find recruitment & career events
A guide to Executive Search Firms
How to get headhunted
Recruitment consultancies & websites guide
Careerbuilder Centre
Network your way to your next great job
Relocation
Managing your time effectively
Working overseas & gap years
Training & education guide
Finally, if you are offered that brilliant new job, have you prepared yourself for joining your new employer and making it a big success? Check out our tips in the sections below:
Starting your new job successfully
How to get promoted
Continuing professional development and employability
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