Embracing Redundancy

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development  

Lately I have been seeing a lot of people with recent gaps in their résumés. With the way that companies cut back because of the economy in recent years, that’s really not a surprise. It’s inevitable that good project managers will have been affected and some will have lost their jobs.

For many people though, they still consider it to be a stigma--and that’s simply not the case. In this article, I want to try to provide some practical thoughts on how to deal with job loss when you are applying for new positions. Above everything else you should learn, please don’t ever be ashamed of losing your job!

Don’t try and bury it
I don’t want to make this article too philosophical, but our experiences shape us and make us what we are as professionals today. I can look back at a number of things in my career and recognize how they have helped to make me into a better project manager, and one of those experiences was definitely being made redundant.

I can identify a number of aspects of my leadership style today that came from the few months that I went through closing down a department and putting myself out of work. I am much more self-aware because of what I learned about myself in the tough times of having no job--at the same time that the company that my wife worked for went bankrupt. It wasn’t fun by any …

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