Steady Ground After a Redundancy: Your First 30 Days, Sequenced

Being made redundant is rarely about you, but it lands on you anyway—your routine, your identity, your finances, your confidence, all at once. This is your first 30 days: a calm, sequenced playbook that protects what matters and quietly sets up your next move.

Week 1: stabilise before you strategise

Don't rewrite your résumé this week. Don't post the announcement. Don't apply to twelve jobs the same afternoon. The first week exists for one purpose only: creating stability.

Read the exit paperwork carefully. Confirm your final pay, accrued leave, redundancy entitlement, notice period, and any restraint clauses before you make a single decision based on assumption.

Map your runway. Calculate how many months your savings plus payout cover at current expenses, then again at trimmed expenses. Knowing the actual number lowers the panic more than almost anything else you can do this week.

Tell three people—not the internet. A partner, a trusted peer, and someone outside your industry. You need empathy before you need strategy, and the order matters.

Separate the job from your worth

A redundancy quietly attacks your sense of value—especially if you were genuinely good at the role you lost. Hold two separate truths at once: what happened (a business decision inside a market that shifted) and what you still have (a decade or more of capability that didn't disappear along with the title).

Write a one-page capability inventory: the problems you've solved, the skills you've built, the people who would vouch for you without a second's hesitation. Re-read it every time the doubt shows up.

Don't grab the first thing that looks familiar

The instinct after redundancy is to chase something close to what you just lost. Sometimes that's the right call. Often it isn't. Ask yourself three honest questions before you start applying:

Was I genuinely thriving in that role, or had I quietly been looking for a way out already?

Where is the market actually growing in my field over the next 2–3 years?

• Which of my skills compound over time—and which had I already outgrown?

Update the résumé for where you're going, not where you've been

Refresh your résumé anchored to the next role, not the last one. Strip the internal jargon. Lead every bullet with outcomes and numbers. Use the language of your target market's job ads, not the vocabulary of your old employer.

Reach out to ten people—not for a job, for a 20-minute conversation. Warm introductions consistently fill roles before they're ever posted publicly.

Contract work: a pressure-release valve, not a setback

If your runway is short, seriously consider contract or interim work for the first 3–6 months. It keeps income flowing, keeps your skills current and visible, and removes the financial pressure that pushes good people into accepting the wrong permanent role out of fear.

Know your entitlements before you negotiate anything

Under the National Employment Standards, redundancy pay scales with tenure — typically starting after 12 months of continuous service and increasing up to around 4 weeks per year of service depending on length of employment, on top of notice period payments. Check the Fair Work Ombudsman's redundancy pay calculator against your own payslip before accepting whatever figure HR first quotes you; miscalculated payouts are common, particularly around long-service leave and unused leave loading.

If you're 45 or older, or if the redundancy affects 15 or more employees at once, additional consultation obligations apply to your employer under the Fair Work Act. Centrelink's Jobseeker payment also has a shorter waiting period for genuine redundancy in some circumstances — it's worth a call even if you don't expect to need it, purely to understand the safety net that exists if your search runs longer than planned.

The first 30 days, in one line

Protect your finances and your sense of self first, verify every dollar you're owed, then move deliberately rather than desperately — the people who land well after redundancy are almost always the ones who resisted the urge to rush.