Redundancy is frightening, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But I’ve stood in that particular fear — and I want to tell you what I found waiting on the other side.
Maybe you’ve just had the meeting. The one held in the too-gentle voice, with the folder already printed, where someone who quite likes you explains that it isn’t about you, it’s about “the direction of the business.” Or maybe it hasn’t happened yet, but you can feel it in the corridor — the reorganisations, the sudden quiet, the sense that the floor under your desk has gone a little soft. Either way, if that’s you right now, I’m not going to hand you a motivational slogan. You’re allowed to be frightened. This is a genuinely frightening thing, and anyone who breezes past that hasn’t lived it.
I’m writing about it because a great many people are standing exactly where you are this year — and because, a few years ago, I stood there too. In my thirties, I was trapped in a role I couldn’t stand, trading my hours for someone else’s money on terms I’d never agreed felt fair, and quietly terrified of the day it might end. When you feel that fear, you learn something uncomfortable: it isn’t really the job you’re clinging to. It’s the certainty. And certainly, it turns out, was never something an employer could truly promise me in the first place.
The honest scale of it
Let me not soften the picture, because you can feel when you’re being managed. Here in the UK, the official redundancy rate eased a little in the spring to around 3.8 people in every thousand employees in the three months to April — and yet it’s still higher than a year ago; that tidy figure hides the thing you’re really feeling. Vacancies have slid to roughly 711,000, the lowest since early 2021, with something like two and a half people now chasing every open role. Fewer of us are being pushed out than the noise suggests, but there are markedly fewer doors to walk back through.
And the warning lights are flashing harder than that headline rate lets on. The advance notices employers must file before making cuts have been running at levels not seen since the last recession — the number issued this February came in almost exactly at the level of February 2009, just before that downturn hit its worst. Last year was the grimmest for redundancy warnings since the pandemic. So if the mood feels tenser than the official statistics imply, you’re not imagining it; you’re reading the room correctly. And this is no longer only a tech story if your industry hasn’t made a headline yet, that’s luck rather than immunity.
Here’s the part that stings most, and it’s worth naming. A great deal of this wave is being driven by artificial intelligence — named, month after month, as a leading reason for cuts — and much of it is happening at companies making healthy profits, not losing money, firms choosing to spend fortunes on machines rather than keep people. And there’s a quieter truth underneath even that. Plenty of businesses have discovered that “AI made us do it” is a tidier thing to announce than “we over-hired and now we’re correcting it.” Some of these cuts are genuinely about new tools; some are old decisions wearing a fashionable label. I mention this not to comfort you falsely, but because it matters enormously for how you carry it: in most cases, this is not a verdict on your worth. It’s a spreadsheet, and you happened to be on it.
The fear underneath the fear
The redundancy itself is a single bad day. The thing that actually keeps you up is the unknown that follows it — the blank space where the routine used to be. I understand that space intimately, because I’ve done some of my best living inside it, though I’d never once have volunteered to go in.
The old arrangement — one job, one ladder, one employer holding the only key to your income — is precisely the deal I spent years resenting before I ever had the nerve to leave it. It looks like security right up until the morning it doesn’t, and redundancy is simply that arrangement showing you its true face. Which means the fear you’re feeling isn’t weakness. It’s the correct response to having handed your whole livelihood to a single decision-maker who was never obliged to keep it. Seeing that clearly is the first small piece of your power coming back.
What I’d be looking at next
I won’t tell you what to do, because I don’t know your bills, your people, or your particular brand of courage. I can only tell you how I read a moment like this. The skills you built didn’t leave the building with your lanyard — you still have them, and they’re portable. The instinct I’d follow now is the one this whole brand is built on: to stop waiting to be handed an opportunity and start building a small one of my own, from exactly where I stand, with whatever I’ve got.
That might mean turning what you know into something you’re paid for directly. It might mean stitching together more than one modest income so that no single employer ever again holds the entire key. It might simply mean learning to use the very tools that unsettled the market, so you stand alongside them rather than beneath them. None of it needs to be dramatic. Small starts count. The point isn’t to leap; it’s to take one honest step toward an income that has your name on it and not just theirs.
And the thing that steadied me when the money wasn’t steady — I’ll say it plainly, because it’s true — was being anchored to something that couldn’t be made redundant. Work can be taken. Your worth cannot, whatever the folder says.
The quiet takeaway
Please don’t make the biggest decisions of your life in the first frightened week of being home. Breathe. Take an honest inventory of what you actually have — the skills, the contacts, the little runway you didn’t realise was there. Then take one small step toward something of your own. “Redundant” is a word for a role that a company no longer needs. It has never once described a person, and it certainly doesn’t describe you.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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