What to Do in the First 30 Days After Losing Your Job

Days 1 to 3: Absorb, Do Not Act

The first advice I give to anyone who has just been made redundant is counterintuitive: do not do anything professionally significant for the first 72 hours. Not on LinkedIn, not with your CV, not in terms of reaching out to contacts. The emotional state of those first days, a mixture of shock, anger, anxiety, and sometimes relief, produces decisions and communications that do not serve you.

In those first three days, focus on four things only. Review your redundancy agreement and understand what you have signed or are being asked to sign. Calculate your financial runway precisely. Tell the people closest to you. And sleep.

The professional world will be there in 72 hours. The clarity you will have after that brief pause is worth more than any head start gained by acting immediately.

Week One: Financial and Legal Foundations

Before you can make good strategic decisions about what comes next, you need a clear picture of your financial position and a clean understanding of any legal constraints.

• Review any settlement agreement with an employment lawyer. Most employers provide a contribution to legal fees for this purpose. Use it.
• Map your outgoings against your incoming redundancy payment, notice period pay, and any savings. Set a realistic monthly budget for the transition period.
• Check whether you are entitled to any state support, tax rebates, or pension-related payments based on your circumstances.
• Review any restrictive covenants in your employment contract. Understand what, if any, restrictions apply to whom you can contact and when.

With your financial position clear, you will likely find you have more runway than the panic of the first few days suggested. Most senior professionals have between three and nine months of genuine financial cushion. Knowing the actual number removes a significant amount of the anxiety-driven decision-making that leads to poor choices.

Week Two: The Expertise Audit

This is the most important week of your 30-day plan, and it is the one most people skip because it does not feel like action. It feels like reflection. But this work is the foundation of everything that follows.

Spend week two doing a structured audit of your professional expertise. The goal is to translate your career history from a list of roles and responsibilities into a commercial inventory of the specific problems you solve, the outcomes you produce, and the knowledge you have that others would pay to access.

Work through these questions in writing, not just in your head. What problems have I been brought in to solve, repeatedly, across different roles? What results have I produced that are measurable and demonstrable? What would have not happened, or happened much more slowly, without my specific involvement? What do senior people in my field ask me for advice on? What do I know that took me ten years to learn and that cannot be quickly acquired?

The output of this exercise is the raw material for your positioning, your offer, and your outreach, regardless of whether you are returning to employment or building an independent practice.

Week Three: Conversations and Direction Setting

With your financial picture clear and your expertise audit complete, week three is about testing what you have learned in conversations with your network.

Reach out to ten to fifteen people who know your work well: former colleagues, clients, mentors, industry contacts. The purpose of these conversations is not to ask for a job or a referral. It is to test your thinking about where your expertise could be most valuable and to understand what problems people in your sector are currently trying to solve.

Ask questions like: What do you think I am genuinely best at? Where are you seeing demand for the kind of expertise I have? Who do you know who is dealing with [specific problem you solve]? These conversations do three things simultaneously. They sharpen your thinking, they warm up your network, and they frequently produce the first genuine lead.

By the end of week three, you should have a clear sense of whether you are moving toward a new employment role, toward independent consulting, or toward building something more substantial. This does not need to be a final decision, but you need enough clarity to know which direction to lean in with your efforts.

Week Four: Build the Foundation, Commit to a Direction

By week four, you have the information and the clarity to make a genuine strategic decision. This week, commit to one. Not irrevocably, but with enough conviction to put genuine energy behind it for the next 90 days.

If you are moving toward independent consulting: write your positioning statement, identify your one core offer, update your LinkedIn with language that speaks to clients rather than employers, and schedule three to five follow-up conversations from week three's outreach. If you are moving toward employment: update your CV and LinkedIn in line with the clarity from your expertise audit, identify your target organisations and roles, and begin the outreach process from a position of confidence rather than desperation.

By the end of 30 days, you should have a clear direction, a realistic financial picture, a network that knows you are in motion, and an early pipeline of either conversations or applications. That is a stronger position than most people find themselves in at this stage, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

The first 30 days matter more than most people realise. Not because the decisions you make are permanent, but because the habits and momentum you establish, or fail to establish, compound over the months ahead. If you want support structuring this period more deliberately, read about working with me or apply directly.