Lost Your Job or Worried About Job Security? Here Are Tips for Moving Forward

Between a steady drumbeat of layoffs in the news in recent years and this month’s report that February saw the highest number of layoffs in the U.S. since the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, job-havers and job-seekers are feeling the stress of uncertainty.

Jen Coleman, who leads the Armstrong Center for Alumni Career Services at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, supports Darden alumni on their career journeys every day. The Darden Report caught up with Coleman to gather her insights on how to deal with job loss, career uncertainty and steps you can take to “future-proof” your employment.

Q:  What advice do you have for someone who is caught in layoffs or other sudden job changes?

Jen Coleman: It starts with the question, what do you want to do? A common mistake is starting to send out resumes and make phone calls before you’ve really done the work on what it is that you want. Understanding what you are pursuing and why and being able to articulate that in a succinct way is a precursor to shooting out your resume. Slow things down, be strategic about it.

Your vision for what comes next informs your personal marketing materials: your resume, LinkedIn profile, outreach plan and who you’re going to target. A lot of people of course have a sense of what their core competencies are, or their personal brand, but if you haven’t had to articulate it in a while, it might be a new way of thinking.

Changing your personal brand can absolutely be done, but it is hard to do under duress. If you need a job urgently, you may want to try to get back to a position of strength before you explore radical change.

Q: A gap in employment can be a real source of anxiety for job-seekers. How should folks deal with the gap between their old job and next job?

I sometimes think that people over worry about a gap on the resume. They are very common. Losing your job, taking a hiatus, whatever it may be, these things happen. It doesn’t take away from the value that you can add for a particular role.

This is why taking some time to process is important. Take care of yourself, get yourself in the right head space, because you don’t want to bring the anxiety, fear and sometimes anger, which are all natural when you lose your job, forward into networking and interview conversations. You want your conversations to be about forward motion.

Another thing is staying engaged with people. Job-seeking can be lonely, and when you’re feeling humbled and insecure, your confidence is low. It’s really easy to just withdraw from everything, and I think that’s counterproductive. See friends, see family, volunteer your time, whatever you need to do to just be around people who value you and care about you.

And the third step is, if you have an opportunity, take on some project work to keep yourself professionally engaged.

Q: For those whose industry seems precarious, what should they do to prepare for the worst and position themselves for the best?

In that case, it’s all about the skills that you can transfer. For example, if you have been in a procurement role in the government and you lose your role, and you can’t get another job in government right now, then you’d be thinking about how you can take your procurement skills to the private sector. This is where thinking about your brand and where else that brand might have value is important.

I think it’s a healthy exercise for anyone, especially if you’re feeling anxious, to think, “What would I do if what I do went away?” Alumni career services teaches a workshop called the Darden Life Design Lab, and one of the exercises explores that very scenario. Having a sense of what you might pursue, of what makes you valuable and firing up your network is important regardless of your current job status.

Q: What are some common pitfalls people fall into?

One pitfall is approaching the process sequentially. So, maybe you fire off a couple of applications and get an interview. You enter the interview process, which can take a couple of months. You think it’s going well, but a few months later you find out the company went in a different direction and you feel like you’re starting all over again. You want to be constantly stacking your pipeline of opportunities and not waiting.

Perhaps the biggest pitfall is neglecting your network while you have a job. The candidates I see who struggle the most when they lose their job are typically ones who haven’t networked, or haven’t thought about job change, in a really long time. It’s hard to, on a dime, fire your network back up. It’s a muscle that constantly needs to be worked.

Q: Networking can feel overwhelming to a lot of people, especially if you haven’t done it in awhile or number among the introverts of the world. How do you suggest firing that network back up?

Part of it is a mindset shift. We’re not talking about necessarily mastering a cocktail party. Networking is about finding mutual value. It’s about finding ways to help each other.

I think what troubles job-seekers about networking is that they feel like they’ve got hat in hand. But the mindset shift is about finding someone who needs someone like you. You have something tremendous to offer, and it’s a matter of just finding the right connections where there’s mutual value and mutual benefit.

It may be that they don’t have a hiring need, but maybe there’s another way that you can be helpful to them. And so, if you’re networking with people with whom you share interests, then there are going to be ways that you can help each other either in the moment or in the future.

In other words, think less about what you’re asking for, and think more about what you have to give and practice being generous with that.

The Armstrong Center for Alumni Career Services’ (ACS) mission is to provide quality career management services to all degreed Darden alumni throughout their lives. Explore our range of public resources designed to empower and guide you as you navigate the next chapter of your career.