TRACEY BOWLES admitted having mixed emotions when she was made redundant. During 24 years working for Lloyds TSB, she had risen to become a senior operations manager with Black Horse Life Assurance, earning £50,000 plus £10,000 in bonuses. But she had become stuck in a rut, so the news that restructuring would cost her the job wasn’t totally bad.
“I was very anxious, wondering where I was going to get another job that brought in that sort of money in Kent, but part of me was grateful,” she said.
Two years on, she is earning more than she did at Lloyds TSB, working fewer hours and for most of the week is based at home in Gillingham. She has acquired new skills and qualifications and has not looked back.
What helped Bowles, 46, turn an apparent setback into a triumph was the opportunity to consult an outplacement service as part of her redundancy package.
She joined a three-month programme with Fairplace, a London career-and-talent management consultancy, with Lloyds TSB footing the bill.
With the firm’s expert support, Bowles identified the key skills she had gained during her time with the bank. She then explored the sort of work she thought she might enjoy and set about completing the set of skills she needed to move on.
The result was rather unexpected: a portfolio career in two fields in which she previously had no experience.
Fairplace offered her a job as an associate, drawing on her personal skills and financial-services expertise to provide careers advice, and she made up the rest of her income from independent mortgage broking. This also built on her existing skills but required training for the Certificate in Mortgage Advice and Practice.
“It was very tough and the exam was horrendous,” said Bowles. But she passed first time.
Now she is happier than ever. “When you get a result – place a difficult mortgage or someone settles in a new career – the feed-back is tremendous,” she said.
Bowles’s story might contain some crumbs of comfort for City workers waiting for the credit crunch to bite.
In recent years, financial staff have found it fairly easy to get fresh employment in the wake of redundancy. But Christopher Hitchins, an employment lawyer at Latham & Watkins, questioned whether that would be the case if significant numbers of lay-offs were made.
“With so many people potentially joining the job market at the same time, are those who get outplacement counselling going to get a head start on the rest?” he said.
Most organisations offer such counselling in redundancy packages in part to persuade departing staff not to bear a grudge against their former employer.
The amount of help made available can vary enormously. Junior staff with little service might be given workshops on CV writing and interview technique, but most can expect between £1,000 and £5,000 to pay for differing levels of support and advice.
At Citigroup, the big American bank that employs 13,000 people in Britain, packages are tailored to reflect the individual’s level, length of service and the conditions in the job market.
Sarah Allen, employee-relations specialist at Citigroup, said redundant staff were sent to one of two respected outplacement companies to help them move on.
“Not everybody takes it, but more than 80% of those that do manage to get new jobs retrain and change careers or start their own businesses,” she said.
Redundancy can be a positive experience, according to Harry Freedman, chief executive of the consultancy Career Energy.
“Most people stumble from one job to another – work is something that happens to them rather than something they control,” he said. “Redundancy is a wake-up call, an opportunity to take a step back and ask what do I want from my career.”
Outplacement firms assess their clients’ skills, personality, motivation and ambitions to help them find out what they may want to do next and what they need to do to get that job.
It is a process of self-examination that can throw up some surprising results when such individuals ask, possibly for the first time in their life, where they want to be in five years’ time.
Most return to a job in the same industry that demands the skills they already possess. Others decide to use their expertise to move into a fresh field. A minority – perhaps 10% – look to a more radical move, one that will require new skills. The rewards can be great.
“People rarely invest in themselves and very few have had any form of career counselling,” said Michael Moran, chief executive of Fairplace. “Those who decide on a significant career change will typically retrain.”
Moran has helped an agricultural chemist to set up an alpaca farm in East Anglia, a financial director to run a garden centre and an office manager to become a football statistician, and said that a growing number of senior City workers were deciding to go into teaching.
More typically, retraining might involve studying for accountancy examinations in order to switch fields.
The result was usually a job with more responsibility and satisfaction than before. Moran estimated that two-thirds of those who sought career advice after redundancy – as in the case of Bowles – also managed to improve their pay.
Tom Hadley, director of external relations at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said a varied background that included retraining could be attractive to employers who were becoming more open-minded about what an individual could bring to their organisation.
“Some people need retraining but also need to get some practical experience, even if that’s a temporary assignment,” he said.
Studying for an MBA is another option. Clare Hudson, the director of career-management services at Manchester Business School, said that many of those who took the intensive one-year course were looking to change the direction of their career.
Redundancy was often the necessary prompt, which might ultimately help someone from an information-technology background to move into investment banking or people from a financial background to set up in business on their own. “An MBA is a gateway to a completely different career,” she said. “It can open so many doors.”
The typical MBA costs about £30,000, which might make it a difficult option for someone with commitments. Certainly most, if not all, of the cost would have to be met from the individual’s own pocket, although some contribution from the former employer may be possible.
But Peter McInnes, director of teaching and learning at the University of Strathclyde Business School, said that for most people it was worth the sacrifice of a year living frugally to take their career in new and exciting directions. “You’re making a serious investment in yourself,” he said.
