With all the current talk about job losses and redundancies I'm reminded of a situation I was in back in 1996. I had recently moved to the UK at the time and had a great job working for a modern international software company. The position was that of a support specialist in a particular niche database technology. The company was right (or wrong) sizing and they had decided to relocate their International support operation to the HQ in the States and disband the UK international support group. When I had joined the company only 6 months prior I had been introduced to the HR company lawyer in my induction with the words, "if you ever get called into a meeting with your boss and this man happens to be also sitting there, then it is probably your last day in the company."

It was 10am and I was called into a meeting only to find that yes, you know who was there. I was given four weeks notice and I felt very alone until I walked out into the open plan office and found that all 9 others in the international group had also had the same meeting. It was little consolation as I had not been expecting to lose my job at all. Now that I've set the scene I'll focus on the point I want to get across. There was only one other expert in the UK who supported the same database I supported and he was one of the 9 who was let go along with me. We had a thriving local (UK) operation that needed technical support on this product and the only two experts on the product had been let go within the same hour. At 5pm I was reluctantly called back into my boss's office and offered my job back supporting the same product. The managers had not thought about the Intellectual capital which they were losing until they had lost it. In actual fact it really was too late as I had already been on the phone that afternoon to the States and had arranged an interview asking to relocate to HQ on the International team once again. The other expert who had been let go lived in a city in the north of the country. His office was being closed entirely and he didn't want to relocate to London, which is where I had been. I turned down the offer to take my job back. The London (UK) office was now stuck with the situation of desperately needing to employ and train from scratch to support their local client base, which was a costly affair. There is definitely a lesson in effective planning to be learned here.

I did end up immigrating to the US and my career was escalated through the opportunity offered to me as a result of being made redundant. Each cloud has a silver lining.