Redundancy - advice and experiences

[treetoptails]

Hi all,

My husband has just been informed that he’s being made redundant after 15 years with his company. It came out of the blue, he’s in a senior role, and there had been no prior indication of any redundancies although we’ve since found out others are facing similar.

The company is offering the standard statutory redundancy package, plus an additional £5,000. It’s a big corporate company and not a small business. We’ve got in touch with a solicitor and are currently waiting to hear back for legal advice.

In the meantime, I wanted to ask:

Other than job hunting, is anything else we should be doing right now?

If you have been through a similar situation, is there anything you wish you had known or done differently at the time?

Any insights or experiences would be really appreciated.

Tell him to ask for them to provide or pay for outplacement support (career and job search coaching). Unless they have a policy of paying more than the statutory amount it’s probably not worth trying to pursue more redundancy payments. Any bonus due? You could ask for the proportion of the year to be paid for that.

Thank you for your response. Do you know what he could typically expect from outplacement support? Is it a financial or do they pay a service on his behalf?

Usually the employer will pay a company to provide the service to the employee

Keep calm
be realistic - it can easily take 6 months to find a new role
neityer that not the redundancy are a reflection on your DH although his self esteem will be battered

assuming nothing comes through within 6 months consider temp roles even if they are way below your pay grade and skills - that not only helped my DH with his pride / self esteem - it also led to the best paid role he ever had

ghe mental side of things is critical- you can’t do your best applying for roles when you are down so get him outside and exercising , get him contributing more to the house stuff - he’s in charge of all meals now for example - tell him how that is really helping you , how proud you are of how he approaches it , doing his bit ( better than other weaker men who won’t do things they see as beneath them - you know - make it really clear )

Register for benefits on day 1 of unemployment. It means that national insurance contributions will be paid.

Good advice, thank you.

Luckily we’ve always planned financially for one of us losing our jobs so we should be ok for a while. As you say, the mental side will probably be the trickiest!

It feels like a long road ahead 😬