What a month September has been.
I have spent most of the month speaking with several of you who returned from your summer holidays to fresh redundancy announcements. For many of you it was a real shock. I can hear the frustration and anger in your voices, and most notably, the fear underneath it all.
In what is quickly becoming an AI world, I have heard so many of you ask the same question. Does the work you have spent a whole career building still count for anything, or has the world moved on without you?
Some of you reading this will be in that position right now. Others will be watching it happen to people around them and taking a fresh look at how safe their own footing is. Either way, you find yourself thinking about a job search you never planned on running.
So let me say this plainly before we go any further. The experience you have built still matters!
Is it just me or am I seeing redundancy announcements everywhere?
In the last few weeks alone, Harvey Nichols has announced a restructure following its takeover by Frasers, H&M has begun consulting on up to 250 roles at its UK head office, and the company behind O2 is cutting around 1,400 jobs. It reaches well beyond retail and telecoms too, with the likes of Nestlé, BAT and Microsoft all working through cuts of their own.
These are only the names we all recognise. Any employer planning 20 or more redundancies has to give formal notice well ahead of time, and those notices are the earliest sign we get of what is coming. In the first two months of this year they were up 9% on the same point in 2025, with more than 56,000 roles flagged before most of us had heard a thing. More and more of that is landing on experienced, senior people.
So why is this happening to people who are so clearly good at what they do?
Many of you will assume that it's the rise of AI that is driving redundancies. What we are finding is that right now so many of you great leaders are being let go because of money.
Businesses are under real cost pressure. Wages have risen, employer National Insurance has risen alongside them, and a great deal is being spent on technology and transformation, all while demand has softened.
When a business decides to bring its costs down, and to do it quickly, it usually starts with its biggest numbers. An experienced salary is one of the biggest numbers there is, and one senior role can cost what several junior ones do. That is often where the decision lands.
Here is what that tells us. A budget had to come down, and senior salaries were the quickest way to bring it down. That is a decision about this year's numbers. The judgement you have built over a career, and the calm that comes from having steered through hard moments before, did not lose their worth the day a spreadsheet was balanced.
A market this uncertain is the very moment that worth comes into its own, because the people a business leans on when the ground is moving are the ones with the experience to read it and the steadiness to act on it. That is the hardest thing there is to replace, and no technology has come close.
Demonstrating your value as a leader
The conversations I enjoy most are the ones where I help a leader understand what makes them great.
You have spent years with your head down, doing the work and letting the results speak for you. The people around you already knew what you brought, so there was never much need to spell it out.
Your worth tends to live in the heads of the people you have worked with. It sits in the calls you made under pressure, and in the problems that never turned into crises because you were the one who saw them coming. Very little of that lands neatly on a CV, and none of it explains itself to a stranger. A new employer only ever has what you are able to put in front of them.
So the task is to take all of that and make it visible to someone new, and that is where a personal value proposition comes in.
A personal value proposition is a clear, grounded account of the value you carry and the problems you are the right person to solve. It captures the handful of things you do that a business genuinely needs, and it puts them in language a new employer takes in straight away. It speaks to what is keeping that employer awake at night, and it gives them the confidence to look at you and think, this is the person we have been looking for. When you can do that in a first conversation, the years of experience behind you finally have somewhere to land, and you walk in already looking like the answer to a problem they have been sitting with.
This is also work we do directly with organisations. Alongside the individuals we support, we are brought in by businesses that are having to let their leaders go. These are leaders the business rates, the sort it would hold on to if the numbers allowed. For the organisation, it is a way of doing right by people who gave them years of good work.
If you take one thing from this month's newsletter, let it be this.
Being made redundant in a year like this one is a decision about a budget, and very little else. It is not a verdict on how good you are at what you do. The experience you have built still matters, and in a market like this one it matters more, because the leaders a business wants around it in uncertain times are the ones who have already proven they can handle them.
The only thing left to do is to put that experience into words a new employer can understand, so that everything you carry becomes clear to someone who has never met you. That is the work I enjoy most, and it is the work I would be glad to do with you.
If any of this has been sitting with you these past few weeks, whether you are going through it yourself or taking a fresh look at where you stand, I would be glad to hear from you. You can reply to this email or book a virtual brew using the link below.
Job Search Strategy Session
If you are heading into a job search this autumn and want to make sure you are approaching it the right way, book a one-hour consultation with me. We will look at your situation, the roles you are targeting, and build a clear plan so you are not wasting time and energy on the wrong things. You can book using the link below.
Thank you, as always, for continuing to trust me to guide you each month.
Best of luck!
Dave Crumby
Your Career Optimiser | Certified CV Writer