The Wilderness Diaries, Episode 1: Access Denied
I had just returned from a short compassionate leave when my regular fortnightly catch-up turned into something else entirely. An HR officer slipped quietly into the room. Within seconds, I understood: I was being made redundant from my job with a major bank in London.
I was stunned. I had not seen it coming.
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Discretion, I was told, was key. I would wait in the HR officer's office rather than return to my desk, so as not to alarm colleagues. When I was finally allowed back, my phone was dead, my laptop locked, my access card useless.
Twenty years in finance, switched off in the time it takes to drink a coffee. I was 53, one of a wave of people let go by a reputable financial firm. It had nothing to do with performance; my reviews were consistently excellent. It came down to a headcount number on a spreadsheet.
What follows is something nobody prepares you for. The French call it la traversée du désert, the crossing of the desert. Here, the desert is the job market. The headlines said London's unemployment was low, so I was confident I would bounce back fast. Not out of revenge, but because I wanted to show my former employer they had made a mistake.
Six months and more than 200 CVs later, I have very few interviews and a collection of stories: friends who went quiet, recruiters who ghosted me, algorithms that never gave me a chance, and a Jobcentre Plus experience that deserves a column of its own. There is the company where I sent ten referred applications and never received a single screening call. There are the ex-colleagues who ask, kindly, whether the job market is tough. Over it all sits a constant weight, mental and physical, that I did not expect
I thought I was alone. Not lonely, exactly. But alone. I could barely look at the people streaming into the offices around Canary Wharf, Bank and Liverpool Street. It wasn't jealousy. That came later. It was the feeling that I had become useless, a weight on society, a laughing stock. Then a friend, made redundant at the same time as me, sent me an article, and the penny dropped. The job cuts in UK banking have been brutal in the past few years and as AI is rolled out there are even more cuts to come.
I now know that I am not alone at all. I was simply wrong. Getting a new job will not be easy, not at all.
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