ReACT now to redundancy!

Gone are the days when employees would enter a career with one employer and stay there until retirement. The concept of a ‘job for life’ is now long gone as employment continues to become more and more insecure. Some that have been with the same organisation upwards of twenty five years are now finding themselves entering the jobs market for the first time since leaving school and that can be a daunting prospect, whatever your age or profession.

Since the beginning of the year, Welsh workers have been plagued by redundancies with the trend for jobs to be offshored to low cost economies in Eastern Europe, India and the Far East going strong. Just this week, four hundred jobs were shed at Cranberry Foods, a turkey manufacturing company in Abergavenny, while at the end of March over 300 jobs were lost at Burberry in Treorchy following the company’s controversial decision to move its production lines to Spain, Poland, Portugal and China. In addition, a further 300 jobs were axed at the beginning of the year by DVD manufacturer Technicolor when production moved from Cwmbran to Poland.

Unfortunately, as companies come to terms with technological advances or review where their operations should be based, redundancy situations in Wales are likely to continue and become a steadfast fact of modern working life.

In these redundancy situations the importance of managing both the staff leaving and the staff staying cannot be emphasised enough.

While up to £2,500 can be claimed by those staff leaving to retrain for re-employment, this money is not being taken advantage of. After being made redundant, it’s not unusual for people’s confidence to be knocked with many feeling too scared or ill-equipped to embark upon new training. Faced with that situation, it’s easy to see why so many people fail to understand that it’s their roles or jobs that have been made redundant, rather than them as individuals.

It may not seem like it at first, but redundancy is a great opportunity to assess your situation and re-evaluate what is important in your life. Redundancy gives people the option of considering other opportunities available from retraining or taking the same job in another company, to doing something totally different to a previous career with an estimated fifty percent of those made redundant considering starting up on their own.

According to research people who are laid off in this country typically take 20 weeks to find a new job, with those that have taken the proactive steps of undertaking training coming across more positively.

Training companies such as ourselves and advisory bodies like Careers Wales are there to be taken advantage of. We want to inspire and encourage people to retrain and embark upon new careers and can provide the skills and qualifications that today’s employers are seeking.

For further information about what courses are available if you have been affected by redundacy check out our Course Directory.