By Megan Tatum, BBC
When Suki Lanh heard she was to be one of 20 staff laid off at a financial-tech start-up in July 2022, her first reaction was fear for what it could mean for her career.
“I was initially scared because I had seen layoffs happening all across the tech industry, so I worried I wouldn’t be able to find another job for several months,” says the 31-year-old, from Tampa, Florida, who had been working with the firm as a copywriter and social media creative producer for a little more than a year.
Within a few days, however, that feeling had given way to a new sense of freedom and camaraderie with her former colleagues. “After having the time to process, grieve, laugh and even do some virtual day drinking with my colleagues immediately following the layoff, I actually felt empowered and excited,” she says.
A few days later, she put her video skills to use, creating and sharing a 40-second video on her LinkedIn profile that playfully highlighted the new hobbies she’d found time to take up after being laid off.
Lanh had made the video on a whim “to make [her] friends laugh”. But it struck a chord, scoring thousands of views and likes, and prompting a flood of recruiters to get in touch. Within a month, she’d had final-stage interviews with seven companies, got two job offers and accepted a role with a retailer as a senior copywriter, with a 50% salary bump. She’d also been approached by several brands to make similar video content for them on a freelance basis.
It was a jump forward in her career that she says never would’ve happened without being cut. “Being laid off accelerated that timeline for me,” says Lanh. “I’m someone who likes to have a thoroughly planned out timeline for my goals. This sudden life change taught me that there is no perfect moment to take the leap.”
As significant layoffs persist across nearly all sectors of the global job market, many different types of workers have found themselves cut – employees with decades-long tenure, pregnant women and high-fliers alike. For many, the impact is substantial, with a loss of financial stability, health insurance, confidence or even sense of identity.
But for some, the experience of being laid off can catalyse positive change. According to a LinkedIn survey of more than 2,000 US workers in December 2022, seen by BBC Worklife, 27% of people laid off end up seeing redundancy as the best thing that ever happened to them. Some start their own businesses; others find a new career they love, or use the opportunity to reevaluate their work-life balance. These former employees have found themselves with opportunities they say they wouldn’t have had without going through a job cut – and newly laid-off workers may be encouraged by how they’ve found silver linings.
‘Existential re-orientation’
Few spot the potential positives in being laid off straightaway.
People are hard-wired to view an experience such as being laid off as an overwhelmingly negative change at first, thanks to our inbuilt negativity bias, explains UK-based career-development coach Genna Clark. “It’s a survival mechanism that means we’re more likely to seek out, validate, reflect on and give weight to the negative, because when we do that, we survive. Change we haven’t chosen, like being laid off, triggers this negativity bias in a really intense way. It’s new and threatening. That makes us likely to catastrophise.”
That’s why when New York-based Lance Gould found out he was one of 500 people laid off by AOL in 2016, ahead of its merger with Yahoo, he initially felt “panic” at the loss of financial security and health insurance. And despite having worked as an executive editor at Huffington Post for more than five years, he questioned how easy it’d be for someone in their 50s to find another role at a top publication. “I’d been laid off before, but this one hit differently,” he says.
To conquer that panic, he sent out job applications, then sat through a series of interviews for two different roles he ultimately didn’t get. “When those didn’t work out, I said … I’m going to start my own thing.”
Before being laid off, Gould says he’d never seriously contemplated starting his own business. “I didn’t see myself as an entrepreneurial person, and there had always been opportunities in publishing before at high-level publications,” he says. But the job cut pushed him to try something new – and he quickly began to love the challenge of co-founding Silicon Valley Story Lab, a content firm that works with purpose-driven organisations.
“It wasn’t lucrative right away, but it was exciting right away,” he says. “Within the first year, I was in Denmark, Sweden, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Singapore,” he says. “This city guy found himself in a field in South Africa surrounded by tranquilised elephants. It was just bizarre and thrilling and meaningful.”
Discovering new opportunities
Even for people who have relished their careers, the experience of being laid off can still spark a brand-new direction.
In July 2020, as the aviation industry ground to a halt, Sarah Goulding took voluntary redundancy from British Airways. She’d worked with the airline for 32 years, most recently as a purser or cabin manager. “I absolutely loved it,” says Goulding, of Connah’s Quay, Wales. “I fell in love with travelling, with every aspect of flying. I thought that was it, that was me until I retired. I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.”
Covid-19 upended those plans, as Goulding became one of roughly 12,000 laid off by the airline during the pandemic.
Having worked for the company since she was 20 years old, the mother-of-two questioned what other job she could possibly be considered for. She asked British Airways’ HR department to send a report of all the courses and workshops she’d attended throughout the past three decades. Reviewing the list, she was reminded of her qualification in aviation medicine. She’d put the skill to use 30,000 feet in the air many times, attending to women in labour, and people having heart attacks, seizures and loss of consciousness. “I’d really enjoyed that aspect of the job, taking care of people.”
A ’formative learning experience’
Lance Gould, now 57, still considers the experience of being laid off a nasty shock, he says, regardless of what came next.
Yet he is grateful for the new path it put him on. He even launched a second business of his own in 2021, the Brooklyn Story Lab. “I am thankful that it happened, forcing me to write this new chapter, which is such a bizarre and thrilling ride every day. The work is so meaningful that I feel very fulfilled and challenged and sated in terms of my personal and professional bucket list.”
Of course, job loss won’t be a positive experience for everyone. It often carries with it huge financial, mental and emotional impacts that can be difficult to overcome or find upside in. Still, some workers are discovering even little positive elements in their layoffs; for instance, something as simple as learning to have a contingency plan for a possible layoff down the road can potentially buffer future shock.
Ultimately, whatever the take away – big or small – some workers have found that layoffs provide them the push they need to get outside their comfort zones, radically reconsider what they’re capable of and what they want out of life and work. For them, being laid off has a silver lining they’ve relished and learned from.
