So the worse has happened and the job axe has fallen on YOUR head. What now?
Probably the best bit of advice I can give you is to keep busy.
How, I hear you cry? I’ve just lost the very thing that was keeping me busy for seven and a half hours a day, five days a week!
And that’s the crux of it. Treat the whole job search/re-training process as a (full-on) full-time job.
It certainly was for me – I’ve never worked so hard or been so driven in my life. It’s amazing how the thought of being on the breadline sharpens your sense of purpose. I didn’t need motivation – I was like a woman possessed. I literally breathed, slept and ate my job search, dawn to dusk.
Was that a healthy thing to do? Perhaps not. An hour off here and there wouldn’t have made much difference – just don’t be tempted to ‘take six months off’. But for me, not being a productive member of society was just too grim to contemplate.
Another lifesaver was using the time productively in ways related to getting paid work. So that included doing voluntary publicity work for two high-profile charities, using my ReAct funding to acquire a Diploma in Microsoft Office, and taking advantage of some amazing subsidised professional courses run by NUJ Training Wales in Writing for the Web and Social Media.
Through this I built my confidence back up, created interesting things to put on my CV and talk about at interview (you don’t want to look as if you’re just sitting around waiting for a job offer), and made some useful contacts – and great friends – to boot.
One of my lowest points in those first few weeks was signing on for Jobseeker’s Allowance.
Now another word of advice. Even if you have had a lovely sizeable redundancy payment as a security blanket (I didn’t) and don’t feel you need to castrate yourself at the doors of the JobCentre, do it. The horror of that experience every two weeks (I lost track of the number of times I walked out in tears of frustration) was another huge push to keep at my job search, even when I felt exhausted, deflated and beaten. I wasn’t like those people, I didn’t belong there; so it was up to me to prove it to myself.
And now the good news – you WILL get another job. A good one. Maybe even a great one. But it will take time, and effort, unless you’re incredibly lucky.
For me, redundancy turned out to be the best thing that could have happened (in retrospect, of course!) It provided the impetus I needed to leave a job I had begun to hate, with a bullying boss and for a company in whom I’d lost respect.
Now I work for a really cool, forward-looking media company, have a more challenging role (if a rather lengthy commute), and a great manager – and six months on I am happier than I was before all this happened.
So you see, it’s not the end of the world. It just feels like it…
Claire Gardiner, journalist