Career Pivot, If You're Laid Off

I wrote a book about my career pivot (you can buy it at all fine booksellers….just kidding, here’s the link. You can have it for free) and how I think that my journey is transferrable to your life.

I realized recently that my bias was towards people who have a job!

There are a number of people, particularly in tech, who are experiencing layoffs right now so here's a mild adjustment to my strategy for those people.

Layoffs have a different problem set than an employed person.

1. You have all the time in the world. Unfortunately, many people are not all that comfortable driving their own time

2. You have less money available and should be on a tight budget to make your money last.

The tendency of most people is to try to go back to school. Fine, I get it.

But that's not the approach I advocate in my book. School is expensive! You need to be very committed, ESPECIALLY if you are unemployed and financially constrained (you should be committed anyway, I make a lot of recommendations in my book on how to chase education without burying yourself in a debtor’s prison).

Your biggest asset as a laid off employee is YOUR TIME.

Use your time well.

Here's my plan for a laid off person seeking a career pivot:

1. Realize your time is an important resourc

2. Give your time away in service to your goals. The nice thing about giving your time away is that if you don't like it, you can just quit! They weren't giving you money anyway, so don't feel compelled to stay if you don't enjoy yourself or find something valuable.

   1. You have it to give, offer your time to companies that you are interested in working with.

   2. Better yet, offer your time to people doing the work you think you might want to do.

3. If you want to do some education, start cheap and short. I love Coursera for this, the subscription is less than $50 a month for unlimited courses. Take a couple in your area of interest and see if you like it!

Here's my daily plan
1. Give your time away for 2-4 hours a day.
2. Apply to jobs 2 hours a day.
3. Get some exercise for an hour a day. An example: a nice walk outside will get you some vitamin D and vitamin D will boost your mood, something that's critical for people who experienced something as disruptive as losing your job.

Get outside, even better if it’s with your kids!

I'll post an update to my book eventually featuring this info, but in the meantime, I hope this helps.