How to Be Ready to Lose Your Job

Land on your feet when you suspect bad news is looming

Published in

Forge

6 min readOct 15, 2018

Last year, I lost my job when the owner of the website I worked for shuttered it over a union dispute. He had been threatening the shutdown for some time, and though we didn’t know for sure what was going to happen, the air in the office had been heavy for months with pre-layoff anxiety.

Staff jobs in journalism were shrinking long before the shutdown, and to me, the prospect of freelancing in perpetuity seemed untenable. As a single woman with no debt, dependents, or significant health issues, I was in better shape than most, but I still had to make rent.

If you’re in the workforce long enough, there’s a chance that, at some point, you’ll get fired or laid off.

There was also an emotional toll. My work made up a significant piece of my social life, and it was lonely not having my friends and co-workers around me on a regular basis. My job was tied intrinsically to my identity — it was jarring, to say the least, to no longer self-identify based on my occupation.

If you’re in the workforce long enough, there’s a chance that, at some point, you’ll get fired or laid off. “Things are not the way they were when our grandparents were in the workforce, where one company was dedicated to the employee, and the employee was dedicated to the company,” says industrial-organizational psychologist Amy Cooper Hakim, author of Working with Difficult People and founder of the Cooper Strategic Group. “There’s a lack of commitment on both sides.” Hakim says that in any job, it’s a good idea to expect that at some point you might lose it or, at the very least, decide to move on without a backup plan. “Having that as a realistic understanding is very healthy and important,” she says.

So what do you do when layoffs are on the horizon or if you’ve been given the pink slip? Here are some tips to plan ahead and stay afloat.