5 Recommendations For When A Layoff Strikes

Layoffs. The word instantly drops my heart into my gut. Even if I don’t know the person being laid-off personally or the word is simply baked into a company announcing layoffs via LinkedIn, I believe there's a sharpness to “layoff” with which most people will never truly get comfortable.

As we all know, layoffs have become a growing issues in the tech world since 2020. As of early October, 238,397 tech employees have been laid off thus far in 2023. At this rate, the industry is set to double the number of employees laid off this year compared to last year. Roger Lee, creator of Layoffs.fyi- a site dedicated to compiling data about tech layoffs, told Nerdwallet the rise and fall in tech employment over the past few years coincides with Federal interest rates. He predicts that the current layoff trend will decline “when, and only when, it becomes clearer that the Fed is able to slow down inflation.” If he’s right, all of us will continue to wince at our LinkedIn feeds as “layoff” makes its way into more and more friends’ posts.

What’s more interesting, and less surprising, is who these layoffs are most heavily impacting. While I am sure the layers of inequality are more complex than we can even imagine. It’s come to light how women are ironically overrepresented in recent tech layoffs. A July episode of Slate’s podcast, ​​What’s Next: TBD, exposed the numbers. Sampling 3,400 workers who were laid-off, Layoffs.fyi discovered that 45 percent of them were women, and 55 percent were men; a statistic that would deceive anyone without context. The context?

“Women only represented about 39 percent of the workforce overall. They might have been about 45 percent of the layoffs, but they were only 39 percent of the workforce.”

The hosts throw out a number of reasons as to how this disparity could happen- tech’s culture, women being hired more often in roles considered peripheral (customer success, marketing, HR), a lack of female allies in executive positions, etc. The bottom line though: women are taking the brunt of tech layoffs.

Okay, but why write this blog? So many of you already understand what’s happening, even if you didn’t have the data on hand.

Because these layoffs can be opportunities.

No, I don’t mean opportunities to persevere metaphorically or some other patronizing trope. I mean, the work-from-home movement proved how much self empowerment can shape our professional lifestyles and prioritize our needs.

When I was laid-off I didn’t quite move through the rainbow of grief, progressing through each stage from denial to acceptance gracefully. I felt rage, and I burned that rage into a career in tech startups, leaping up the ladder and learning as much as I could along the way. It wasn’t pretty, but it was empowering.

So for anyone who has been blindsided with a layoff and is hungry to regain control, what steps can I recommend?

1. Look for contract or freelance opportunities. Every single maternity leave I’ve covered or freelance role I worked asked me to come aboard full-time. (I love freelancing, so I politely declined, but the point still stands.)

2. Take on projects that demand skills you’ve been wanting to practice or new skills you haven’t learned yet. Worried about imposter syndrome? Don’t be. Just don’t try to charge a premium for work you’ve never done and be honest about your experience level while playing up related types of work.

3. Talk to colleagues, reach out blindly to people you look up to, send that cold (but thoughtful and humble) LinkedIn message.

4. Ask for informational interviews with people to see if you might like what they do (hint, all of us love talking about ourselves and how great we are at our jobs)

5. Let yourself stray from the path you were on, and get excited to blaze a new one

I think cultural norms are a-changin. It’s okay not to be a full-time employee all the time. When you think about it, the interview process doesn’t tell you whether you’re going to be a fit for any job. You have to try things on before you buy them, #amiright?

So whether it is you, a friend, a child, etc. who is dealing with a job loss, I encourage you to lean into the change, hard as it may be.

And reach out to friends, colleagues, and mentors. You don’t have to go it alone.