Pre-Lay Off Full Guide. Part 2
Analyze the job market and assess how in-demand your expertise and skills are.
After working for many years at the same company, it’s easy to fall into the trap of routine and lose sight of industry trends beyond your organization. This can result in your skills becoming outdated and your understanding of the market lagging behind. It’s crucial to regularly refresh your knowledge, stay on top of new technologies, approaches, and best practices that could impact your role. Take a look at how many senior leaders in large companies intentionally and thoroughly build their personal brand outside the walls of their organization. Why? Because they know that visibility and networking are key to staying relevant in today’s unstable world.
Gather all valuable contacts into one document.
— people you could reach out to in case of sudden layoffs. Trust me, it’s way more convenient than scrambling to message old colleagues on LinkedIn after the very fact. Often, LinkedIn is actively used by those who are job hunting or growing their business, but those who are settled tend to go radio silent. That’s the trap: when an unexpected layoff happens, and you urgently need to job search, it becomes very obvious when someone who hasn’t posted in years suddenly pops up. It’s smarter to stay active on LinkedIn consistently, so you never find yourself in that situation.
If you’ve been wise enough not only to work hard but also to keep learning — inside or outside the company — and if you’ve been teaching others or speaking at external events, gather all the proof of that in one place.
This should (and absolutely can) include course and program completion certificates, thank-you notes from workshops or sessions you’ve delivered, speeches you’ve given — wherever and however small they were — as well as feedback, outcomes, and testimonials. Keeping a clear, systematic record of all your professional activities is a powerful habit. Get into the rhythm: finished a course? Logged it. Delivered a training? Logged it. Gave even a short talk at a conference? Logged it in LinkedIn. That way, you won’t have to dig through your memory to reconstruct your accomplishments — and your LinkedIn will quietly work for you in the background.
February 3, 2025.