I Am Unemployed ... Now What Do I Do?

I was laid off when I was a senior vice president at a $2.6 billion travel distribution company with close to a thousand people in my organization. This was the third time that I had been laid off from a senior management position. Your immediate thought is probably that I was a poor performer or, at minimum, had trouble doing my job. To the contrary, I was considered a top performer, earned the highest ratings available, received numerous large bonuses and generous stock options, and consistently met or outperformed my operational metrics. So what happened? The first layoff had to do with a company merger. It was a merger of equals. Unfortunately, our management team was not as equal as the other company’s management team. The following two layoffs were due to corporate downsizing. They were not a result of any recessionary problems. In one case, the company simply outsourced almost half of its business. This left a large number of high-level management people with relatively small departments to manage. My point in telling you this is to make sure you understand that being out of work in many cases has little to do with how good you were at your job. There are a variety of reasons why people get laid off, including an economic recession. It is almost fashionable to be laid off at least once. As of this writing, the United States has an unemployment rate of about 10 percent. This means there are 15.3 million people out of work. This is due to the recession that began over a year and a half ago. I am convinced that most of the people who are out of work are good at what they do for a living; losing their jobs was totally out of their control. So, then the question is not whether you will be laid off, but, “What will you do about it when it happens?” I was devastated the first time I was laid off. I could not believe that my company would do such a thing to a loyal employee who had received such good performance reviews. After about a month of complete inaction following the layoff, I decided one day to take a good look at myself. I assessed all of my skills, not just the ones that I had used for my previous job. As an executive, one of the skills that I had developed over the years was strategic planning, a series of techniques that companies use to sell their products in the marketplace. So I decided to adjust those techniques in order to sell my latest product—me! I began methodically executing my modified strategic planning approach. As a result, I was offered a position that required me to lead an organization approximately twice the size of my previous company. And I realized a 25 percent increase in my compensation package! The purpose of this book is to arm you with the same set of tools for methodically reestablishing your employment that I used.