40,000 people got laid off. Is this a sign?

And what should you be doing now?

Amazon laid off 18,000 people last week. Microsoft laid off 10,000 people last week. Google laid off 12,000 people last week.

That’s 40,000 people… People like you and me who need to….

Support their parents, kids, or spouse.…
Put food on the table….
Pay for bills….

And all of them went from thousands of dollars to zero dollars per month, in seconds.

It’s scary. I know. But instead of blaming the big corporates (whom we know will never change), what should we be doing for ourselves?

(1) Arm Yourself With Your Resume

Your resume is your weapon in the working world. Don’t leave it to rot just because you’re comfortable in a job. Those 40,000 people who got laid off probably didn’t see the retrenchment coming till it was too late.

Remember your achievements at work and strategically place them in your resume. Maybe, even get it professionally vetted, and then, you can do the further updates on your own.

No matter what, don’t rest on your laurels and stay ready.

(2) Start Your Personal Branding

Most of you have LinkedIn. For those that don’t, create one NOW. Why would you not want to be on a platform where:

• It has 810 million users worldwide (that’s 810,000,000!)

• Every minute, 6 people are hired through LinkedIn

• There are 58 million companies on LinkedIn

Remember what you updated in your resume above? Now update that in your LinkedIn profile as well.

This is because recruiters are prowling and searching for their ideal candidates on LinkedIn.

You want your name to come up in their search results when they search for a specific term. That’s how your profile gets picked up, you get a LinkedIn message and you get interviews freely.

The beauty of LinkedIn is that it allows you to expand and write more about your work experiences.

Your resume is a very dense bullet-point summary of all your recent work experiences but LinkedIn allows you to add in more details, achievements, and work-related tasks that could make a recruiter identify you as a perfect candidate.

(3) Start coming up with a job search plan now

If you were retrenched today, what MUST you start doing immediately? Come up with that plan in detail and continue to refine it.

It’s better to plan ahead and think of this plan now, while you have clarity in your head.

Because if or when retrenchment strikes, it can become a jolting, depressing and anxious period of your life that can affect you and your loved ones, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

Some questions you can typically ask yourself are:

• If I’m unable to secure a job after being retrenched, do I have an emergency savings account that can support my bills and my family for at least 3-months?

• Is my resume and LinkedIn done up decently and ready to be submitted at a moment’s notice?

• What job role do I want after this? (List out at least 3 different roles in which you have experience)

• How many resumes am I going to send out a day?

• Is there anyone in my network that I can tap on to ask for referrals?

• What websites should I be on so that I can start looking for jobs?

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Planning ahead is critical for each one of us.

We don’t want to wait for incidents to happen when instead, we can learn from our surroundings and have a solid backup that can give us a boost.