I was chatting to a few people on Friday who had been made redundant from our last agency role the same time as me, and for most of them it was their first time going through it.
It made me realise I’ve had a very different experience in life.
I can think of five redundancies across my career, and then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. My first job at 13 years old, a paper round, ended the same way.
So in a strange way, I’ve been dealing with this kind of instability since the very beginning.
At some point, it stops feeling like a one-off event and starts to look like a pattern. Companies change direction, budgets get cut, roles disappear, and it’s rarely as personal as it feels in the moment.
What it forced me to get good at wasn’t just recovering, but adapting.
I’ve moved between roles, picked up new skills when they became useful, and focused more on staying valuable than staying defined by a single job title.
Looking back, that probably shaped the way I work now more than anything else.
It’s not a lesson you’d choose, but it’s one that sticks.