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There’s a version of career advice about redundancy that you’ll find everywhere. Update your LinkedIn. Tell your network. Be proactive. Stay visible. Treat it like a full-time job.
All of that is eventually useful. None of it is what’s most important in the first three months.
What I’ve observed from conversations with senior professionals navigating exactly this is that the first 3 months after redundancy are almost always mismanaged. Not because people are incompetent. Because the standard playbook is designed to manage optics, not outcomes.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN MONTH ONE
There’s a shock period that most senior professionals don’t fully acknowledge, because acknowledging it feels like weakness. You knew this was coming, or suspected it and yet the reality of the empty calendar, the absence of escalations, the return of your laptop still lands differently than expected.
Most people manage this by moving immediately into action. Starting the CV update. Calling recruiters. Setting up coffee chats. The busyness manages the discomfort.
The problem is that this action - launched from a place of emotional reaction rather than strategic clarity - tends to produce applications for roles that look like the last one. Because when you’re uncertain about what you want, you default to what you know.
And the cycle continues.
THE DIAGNOSTIC GAP
What’s missing, almost universally, is a structured diagnostic phase. A period (it doesn’t need to be long; 2 or 3 weeks is enough) where the work is not applications or networking, but clarity.
What actually happened, and what honest conclusions can you draw from it? What do you want the next chapter to look like. Not what sounds credible to your network, but what you’d actually choose? What are you willing to trade off, and what are you not?
Those questions feel indulgent when there are bills to pay and a gap on the CV to manage. They’re not. They’re the foundation of a strategy that actually works.
THE THREE-YEAR PROBLEM
The other thing I see consistently is a conflation of short-term needs and long-term goals. The next 90 days have real constraints; financial, structural, psychological. The next 3 years represent a genuine opportunity to choose.
When those two timeframes get merged, people make decisions optimised for neither. They take roles that manage the short-term anxiety without genuinely serving the long-term direction. And then they’re back in the same conversation, 18 months later, with more urgency and less optionality.
The professionals who come through transitions well tend to hold both timeframes in mind simultaneously and they’re honest about which decisions are serving which goal.
This is the kind of thinking I’m researching and building frameworks around in the career intelligence space. If you’re in a transition right now, or preparing for one, I’d genuinely value a conversation. Reply here or send me a message on LinkedIn and we can find time to talk.
_David
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