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CAREER STRATEGY NEWSLETTER
Earlier this year, I met for a coffee in a hotel lobby at a company sales kickoff.
Within a few minutes we started talking about my future in the organisation. My role and that of my team was being made redundant.
I'd watched it happen to plenty of people across 15 years in corporate. I knew how it worked but knowing the script does very little for you when you're the one impacted.
Obviously, it feels different.
What tends to happen in the first few weeks
For about 3 weeks afterwards, I did what nearly everyone does. I updated my CV, I spoke to recruiters, applied for a few jobs…
But at the same time, I felt that the way I wanted to process this major career event was to talk to peers in and out of the industry who'd been through it in the past or perhaps were going through it as we speak. And you know as well as I do that there is no shortage of people going through redundancy right now.
I spoke to several people who'd experienced it 2, 3, 4 times!
And I realised that the more senior, the more they'd say: I wish there was better support out there for this.
Not support with the CV. Not another webinar; but something that took them seriously as senior operators and helped them work out the actual questions that matter: how do I flip this issue into an opportunity to find out what I want to do next? And then, how do I get there?
I stopped applying after about a month. I turned down an internal retention offer. And I started building the thing those conversations kept describing.
It's called Zelova (here’s a simple early access waitlist page).
Here's what the career advice industry gets backwards.
When a senior professional is made redundant, every instinct, and almost every piece of advice, points at the market. Update the CV. Call recruiters. Apply. Stay active.
The data on that approach is stark. Cold applications at senior level convert at around 1%. 70 to 85% of Director-plus roles are never advertised in the first place. So the standard playbook targets the smallest, most competitive slice of the market, exactly when you have the least clarity about what you're aiming for.
The tougher question comes second, usually 4-8 weeks in. Who am I without the organisation that defined me, and what do I actually want next.
Almost everyone I've spoken to reaches that question.
Almost no one had anything built to help them answer it. Outplacement is templated for the masses. Good executive coaching runs in the thousands, commonly quoted in the range of $3,600 to $50,000, which is hard to justify for many when you're not earning. Generic AI gives generic answers and forgets you between sessions.
When it comes to structured, personal, affordable career strategy for the individual senior professional, there's very little.
I don't think redundancy is a failure. I think it's a structural displacement event, and increasingly a common one.
Roughly half of recent layoffs have been at manager level and above. Manager headcount is down 6.1% in 3 years. This is org charts changing shape, not a run of bad luck for individuals. Do not be ashamed of this happening to you. Too many people impacted by it feel they have to hide what they're going through.
It's estimated that 3-4 million people go through job displacement in EU and US every single year and the trend is sharply accelerating. You are far from alone.
After opening up to it, the instinct is to rebuild exactly what you had before as fast as possible. The better first response is to treat this important moment as the first real chance in years to decide what you want your next chapter to be. Deliberately. With the same rigour you'd bring to a business decision worth six or seven figures - as much as your next few years of income - because that's precisely what it is.
That's what Zelova is built to do. It's a career strategy service, an AI thinking partner that respects what you've built, asks the questions you haven't had time to ask, and helps you turn the answers into a concrete plan. Not advice dumped at you. A guide that thinks with you. That's the starting point at least.
Here's why I'm telling you this in a career newsletter rather than a founder one. What I'm building and what I'm writing about are the same thing... I'm working through the future of senior careers in public, partly because I believe it, and partly because I'm living it right now myself.
one last thing
If you're a senior professional who's been through redundancy, DM me and tell me what the first few weeks actually felt like. I read every reply.
More soon.
David
A new customer onboards faster than your last hire.
Viktor drafts the onboarding plan from the deal notes, schedules the kickoff, posts the welcome doc to the customer's shared channel, and tracks every step in #cs. Your CSM owns the relationship. Viktor owns the admin.