What's Your Layoff Plan? from Michele Martin on Vimeo.

A big part of career resilience is being prepared for what work throws at you. The more prepared you are when something bad happens, the better you'll feel.

One work event more and more of us are having to deal with is a lay-off. Sometimes you'll see the writing on the wall and can plan for a lay-off. More often than not, though, it will come as a surprise. I know people who thought things were great on Monday and were being escorted from their desks on Friday afternoon. Honestly, you just never know.   

In today's video post I go through what you should have in place to avoid being blindsided in the event of a lay-off.  These are some tips that will help you jumpstart your job search so you don't end up in the ranks of the long-term unemployed. 

A couple of follow-up comments to the video:

I mention in the video the need to have contact information for your network. What I mean here is that you need to have this information accessible to you from a place outside of your job. If all of your contacts are in your work Outlook, you need to do something about that now.  You may not get a chance to access that info.

Related to this, make sure that you can access your LinkedIn account via a personal email address. You do this by going to Settings and then selecting "Edit/Add" next to "Primary Email account." Be sure to add a personal email address and then if you get laid off, make that your primary email. 

Finally, for your personal business/networking cards, you need to have your home contact information, not your work contact information on those cards. The point is that people are able to reach you outside of your previous employment. 

Additional Resources

• 6 Easy Steps to a Great Elevator Pitch---Via Tim Tyrell-Smith 
• Moo--My favorite place for business cards. 
• More on having multiple income streams