April 17, 2002 | In the New Yorker magazine, a cartoon summed up our uncertain economic times. In it, two white-collar professionals face each other in an anonymous office space in Anywhere, Corporate America. One man is seated bolt upright behind a desktop laden with the tools of his generic white-collar trade: notebook, pens, telephone, a picture of the family. Eyes wide and nervous, he clutches at the desk while the other man looms over him gleefully, as though eager to be the bearer of bad news. The caption reads: "Look around you, Crawford. I want you to savor being employed."

If you're a white-collar employee, you probably used to feel more secure about your work life. Just yesterday, it seems, we were living in a world where new electronic technologies promised what looked like endless economic opportunity. Those positioned to take advantage of the so-called New Economy ranged from product managers to software engineers. But even freelance writers and editors, who before the Boom might have struggled along on measly wages, were catapulted into economic brackets they had never dreamed of before.

Everything's different now. The dot-com bust, the terrorist attacks of September 2001, a war, and a harsh economic downturn have combined to cast a pall over the land of easy opportunity. With this in mind, even if you're feeling relatively safe in your job, it would be wise to think ahead and imagine what you might do if you were handed a pink slip.

For 45-year-old San Francisco resident Chandler Downs, the experience of being laid off was "cataclysmic." When the prestigious San Francisco immigration law firm she worked for laid off half its tenured support staff, the news took most of the workers by surprise. Downs, a single mother of two who worked as a senior legal assistant, had been earning $75,000 a year. Her first reaction to the news was nausea.

"I didn't even get to say goodbye to my coworkers," she says. "All of us were processed, one by one, through the exit interview. Later, several people told me they felt sick."

Downs' story is all too common. She had a good job. She expected to keep it. She had never thought about the possibility of losing it. And she had built up no financial reserves. With two weeks' worth of severance pay and three months of paid health insurance benefits for herself and her children, Downs had to make basic survival her immediate priority. Wallowing in self-pity would have been a luxury.

"It's better to feel anger than depression," she says. "It gets you motivated. You give yourself three days. Then you have to come up with a plan. To allay the fears of the children, or a roommate, you tell them you have a plan -- even if the plan changes -- [because] you want to make them feel secure. I'm thinking of bartending -- you can make $200 a shift -- and I'm in school for real estate."

Few industries have felt the layoffs as hard as the once-promising land of Internet businesses. "When the dot-coms started folding one by one, you were dealing with very shocked and angry people," says Kate Ryan Garrison, a career counselor who's been working for eight years in the San Francisco Bay Area. During that time she has counseled not only laid-off tech workers in Silicon Valley but also military personnel hit by the closures of two bases.

"The very fact of losing your job tells you you're not good enough," she says. "People will go through predictable cycles of grief. It can take people anywhere from a couple of weeks to six months to adjust." Your world has been turned on its head, she points out, and circumstances are perfect for an identity crisis. In addition, family dynamics may become more precarious when there's a loss of a major breadwinner.

On the other hand, a layoff could force you to make a daring change for the better, as it did for Robin Evans. Although Evans found it disturbing to be laid off from her marketing job at the San Francisco nonprofit Opportunity Knocks, she admits that when the day came last November, she was actually relieved. The layoff gave Evans, who is 50, the impetus to pursue a long-postponed dream of teaching public school.

"The credentialing process can seem so daunting, especially when you're 50 and you have to prove you had high school algebra," Evans says. "Actually, being laid off cleared a path to go after something I feel passionate about." Now, a few short months after her layoff, she's already doing volunteer teaching at a Bay Area school district to fulfill the classroom hours she needs to enter a credential program, and she's studying hard to pass a battery of required tests. Her partner, who works full-time, has helped by taking on more childcare responsibilities while Evans is in school.

Evans says that structuring her time has been one of the biggest challenges. "It's been disorienting. I find it really hard to spend a lot of time alone," she says. "It's essential to set up a schedule when you're not working. I need the structure of a job. To keep organized, I actually set the kitchen timer to clock various tasks. I'll give myself two hours of cleaning, say, then it's time to put in some hours studying."

Laurence Boldt, the author of Zen and the Art of Making a Living: A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design, stresses that anyone, as Evans demonstrates, can view a layoff as an opportunity. "Whether workers respond creatively and decisively, or get tangled up in denial or distracted by outrage and anger, will spell the difference between taking advantage of the new situation and becoming a victim of it," Boldt writes.

Of course, people without money in savings will find that advice laughable. For that reason, it's good to start thinking about how to create a financial cushion now. To cover the three most crucial needs, make sure you have health insurance (and can afford to keep it going), disability insurance to cover you if you're not working, and enough savings to live on for at least three to six months. This "cash emergency fund" will keep you from sinking into credit card debt if you're suddenly laid off.

You may feel that you don't earn enough money -- or have enough willpower -- to save up such a large sum, particularly if you live in a place like San Francisco or New York City and have to pay a king's ransom for mortgage or rent. The truth is, though, in most cases savings are tied not to people's income, but to their lifestyle. Try writing down everything you spend for a month, and then take a hard look: Can you eat out less? Have friends over more often instead of going out? Buy at discount places rather than paying full price? Take your kids on a hike or to the park instead of to the movies? Living more simply not only will help you save but may be more fulfilling as well.

How do you plan for an uncertain future? If you've been laid off already, you'll need a new résumé or a new spin on the existing one. "A résumé gives you a good overview and [helps] you to appreciate what you've done," says Garrison. "It's a way to acknowledge and validate your strengths." Better yet, dig out some old résumés while you still have a job. Looking them over can give you some clues about what you might like to do next -- or what you'd pursue if you suddenly lost your job.

If you have the luxury of time off between one job and another, check out Boldt's book, which includes a workbook with lots of practical exercises. He provides numerous useful self-esteem builders and self-evaluation quizzes, and the book directs readers to helpful career-oriented Web sites.

Author Ben Cheever's book, Selling Ben Cheever: Back to Square One in a Service Economy, is a grittier tome about clawing your way out of a career hole in the midst of a recession. Cheever was laid off more than a decade ago from his job as an editor and condenser at Reader's Digest and spent five years on a job hunt while he bounced from job to job including working at a sandwich bar, selling computers, and stocking books at a book and music store chain. In an interview in Fast Company magazine, Cheever provided some tips.

Even when your work situation is stable, don't let your job define who you are, Cheever advises. Instead, be aware of the skills you bring to the industry as a whole, which is likely to be less ephemeral than your particular workplace. If you do happen to be laid off, feel free to wallow for a bit, then move on. Being laid off is not a statement about your character, and it's nothing to be ashamed of, he says.

Before a layoff is in the wind, all of us would be well advised to keep our eyes open for new opportunities and to build skills that are transferable to other jobs, Cheever says. If you are laid off, take this time to evaluate your career path, but Cheever advises not to hold out for the perfect job. You might eventually find the job you really want by taking one that's less than ideal.

The idea may seem obvious, but don't hesitate to use your connections to friends and colleagues. Just make sure you pound the pavement too, he says. Cheever got the job he wanted by showing up at the workplace and schmoozing with the employees, who helped him get in to see the manager. "Self-selection is an awfully important thing," Cheever told Fast Company. "If you really want a job, pick out the one you want and go after it."

-- Barbara Jamison is an award-winning poet and writer who edits regularly for Consumer Health Interactive. Her stories on health and medicine have appeared in Hippocrates, WebMD, and the Nation.

First published April 17, 2002
Last updated March 11, 2008
Copyright © 2002 Consumer Health Interactive