What To Do After Losing Your Office Job

You have heard the rumors and seen the signs, and now the portents have all come to fruition. You arrive at the office one morning and are asked to leave after turning in your keys and files, and escorted out of the building by a security guard. You have been laid off.

There is something about large corporates that is deeply impersonal. Employees who have worked with a company for years are suddenly made to feel like they have behaved criminally when in fact it is the company that has let them down. The first thing you need to do if you find yourself in this situation is to shake off all the negative feelings. What’s done is done, and you are now unemployed. The best way to get back in the game is not to wallow in your misery or to get scared but to take immediate action.

The first thing that you will need to do is secure a source of income. Losing your job does not mean that you no longer have to pay bills; the rest of your life is still there even if your job is not. Contact your local unemployment office immediately and begin filing for unemployment checks. Don’t expect them to be anywhere near to what you earned at the job, but it is still money and will hopefully cover your basic necessities. What’s more, many unemployment checks are substantially above what a person can expect to make at a typical moonlighting job.

Don’t spend excessively on anything until you are securely in another job; you will probably have to cut down on a lot of areas that you took for granted, but this is survival mode time. Remember to include health insurance as a necessary expense, right up there with car payments and the rent or mortgage. Bad things happen in groups, and the last thing you need is a pile of uncovered medical expenses following you around.

Remember that without a job, you are vulnerable. There are thousands of companies that have been created to lure vulnerable people into spending their life savings chasing wild geese. A close look and you will find this type of scam everywhere; on late night television, on your car windshield, door-to-door representatives, and telemarketers. Even your email will have some daily same offers! Don’t fall for them. Nothing is every as easy as these deals sound, and you have a good chance of losing everything if you start to invest. Be especially wary of programs that start you out with a low dollar amount and then keep raising the price in order to find out the next “crucial step”. These operations work on the “in for a penny, in for a pound” principle. If you get in for a penny, know when to draw the line.

You will probably feel a lot of angst about being canned, but it is best not to burn any bridges, especially if you have worked for a long time with the company. Your former boss is still a valuable reference, and the chances are that they are next in line to lose their jobs. Management seems to be better at finding jobs than underlings, so the odds are good that the old brass will find a new position before you do. If you maintain a positive relationship, and better still stay in touch, then you might find that you gain a position through an old relationship.