As a person with a non-linear career, I never thought I would be one to provide career advice. But as we enter an era in which thousands of people who thought their jobs were secure are suddenly finding themselves unemployed and not knowing what to do, I am realizing I have actually been training my whole life for this. I’ve probably spent less than 20% of my career in a full-time W-2 job with benefits. There has never been a time where both adults in my household had that kind of job security. We’ve learned how to build our own businesses, survive outside of traditional systems by building strong relationships, and we’ve made it work.
Here are some steps I recommend to anyone struggling with being unemployed, underemployed, or scared for their own work future right now.
Acknowledge any internalized shame
You don’t need to be ashamed for being born without a giant trust fund that can inoculate you from the whims of an unforgiving labor market, or for being unable to predict the intricacies of said labor market decades into the future. Our culture loves to blame individuals, but you have not done anything wrong.
You may find yourself in a situation where you need to take on work that you feel is beneath your stature or pay grade. It happens! You may need to rely on your family, on your community, or on your government. None of these things are wrong or bad or shameful. It’s called living in a society. Welcome!
It’s difficult to fully rid ourselves of this kind of deeply ingrained capitalist shame, but the first step is acknowledging it.
Determine your income needs
Figure out how long you can survive without income, and the lowest income you need to survive. This is an essential part of thriving in a time of uncertainty. How much money do you have? How much do you need? This is NOT an exercise of forced deprivation—it’s a realistic look at what you actually need, what you already have, and how long you can use it without requiring additional income. You may need less than you think.
Find your community
Find your community and make a list of all the resources available to you. I don’t mean a “network” of people you met at conferences who can toss you a referral link. I mean people who really, truly, deeply care about you and want you to succeed.
- What can they do to support you right now?
- What can you do to support them?
- What resources do you and they have access to?
- What can you borrow, trade, or barter?
- Can they get you work—even in a totally different industry or capacity?
- Can you find a way to get on their insurance plan?
- Does someone have a garden with an abundance of tomatoes, an empty vacation home, a dusty legal degree, free time for babysitting, or an HBO passcode to share? Get creative!
The goal here is not to turn relationships into transactions. This is to identify your own personal net, who is in it and how you can help each other in a topsy-turvy time. You don’t have to do everything alone.
Examine your values and priorities
Identify your top values, and consider how you live those values.
- Do you need to work in an industry that aligns with your values?
- Can you work for a company that is morally neutral in a very transactional way and put up very strong boundaries between work and life?
- Can you work for a lot less money at something you deeply care about?
- What will certain types of work do for your mental health? What are the acceptable trade-offs?
Consider alternative career paths and models
We’re experiencing a huge disruption in careers we thought were stable. Some careers are less vulnerable to disruption—some manual trades, jobs that still rely on physical interactions and human touch, etc. But we can’t predict the future, so we need to be creative in how we think about work.
Maybe this means retraining or thinking about how your skills could apply in a different industry. Maybe it means being creative about consulting, working part-time, starting your own business, sharing a full-time job, creating a new union, or redefining work itself.
What we do know is it means being flexible and not seeing any job as permanent. Chances are, you’ll have to be ready to change more than once.
Set yourself up as a consultant
It’s okay if you don’t want to be a consultant! Most people would prefer a full-time job with benefits! But even if that’s true, all of us need to be able to sell ourselves as individual contractors when full-time work is not available (and often when it is!). This means:
- Setting up your business basics.
- Learning about how to file quarterly taxes and relevant deductions.
- Knowing how to navigate your state’s health insurance marketplace.
- Knowing how to buy other services like life insurance on the open market.
- Determining how to identify and price your services.
- Setting up the bare minimum of a basic website so you have it ready for when you need it.
Fight for better working conditions and a social safety net.
We need new laws and systems that recognize the reality we are in right now, not the reality of 50 years ago.
Untangling health care from employment is a great first step. Most of us can agree that your ability to see a doctor should not be dependent on what kind of job you have.
Workplaces should have protections for workers, and we should have enough of a social safety net that very sick people do not have to continue to work for specific employers just to stay alive.
This really shouldn’t be controversial. When you find yourself unceremoniously thrust out of a job that you rely on for basic needs like healthcare, it becomes clearer that a system that relies on the whims of employers is not in service to the vast majority of people.
Want to get some deeper perspective on work that might unfold in our current era? Let’s connect, chat, barter, trade—and expand our personal nets together.