So you got fired.

[NickK]

You're not alone and I thought I would create a thread with some helpful pointers.

People get fired everyday and not always down to their performance, here's a couple of examples from my history:
* Two companies merged, board room politics meant one country office was undermining the other. I highlighted the fact indirectly in a CEO/CTO during a product review due to being told to use under performance outsourced staff vs home grown experienced staff. The now other office line management was giving them the mushroom treatment. Fireworks ensued and my work became unacceptable as I was frogmarched out of the HR system in following couple of months. Prior to that 15+ years of experience and consistent high performance!
* Company change in management, again work appeared to become unacceptable as did others. I was terminated via video the Tuesday after closing the largest deal they had, the next week they closed my old base office (rented off one of the people they also fired) and sold the company. So dismissal under short-term employment (<2 years) is cheaper and faster than redundancy packages. The company agreed to pay my sales bonus for the quarter I'd qualified for - something you don't get if your performance was bad.

So - the biggest piece of advice you can give is: leave it at the door (unless there's illegality), don't take the baggage forward to the new job and get out to build enthusiastic self belief back up. It will feel like the end of a relationship - it will take a period to mentally move on so don't feel guilty about it. Take a day or a week, make a note of your value and awesome stuff and qualities you bring then get back on the bike. You may have even moved on during the last weeks of your employment but the emotions of being "terminated" can leave you feeling self doubtful.. I'm writing this thread to snap you out of it like a good mate down the pub!

The first is this: 7-false-narratives-about-being-fired-to-reject-today

The next is this with respect to cover letters and covering breaks: https://www.myperfectresume.com/car...-the-perfect-cover-letter-after-getting-fired

 

[NickK]

I’ve never been fired, but have signed a settlement agreement in the past.

New IT director really didn’t like me, we rarely saw eye to eye and I was more than happy to directly disobey daft or downright dangerous requests he’d put to me. Ultimately taking the settlement agreement netted me a healthy payout plus the statutory redundancy payment for my 10 year’s service. I was happy, he was happy and the company went under within 18 months, so bullet dodged there.

I took the opportunity to move into a much higher paying role (due to 10 years worth of nothing really beyond inflationary rises and the odd performance related increase).

Every cloud (can) have a silver lining.

That's basically what I had for the first occasion. A healthy payout as part of a settlement.

I agree you can get fired for a valid reason. Own it and move on, and use it to grow. Usually it's a bit of everything as to fault.

 

[NickK]

I see failure as being part of the path. It's trendy being called a "Growth Mindset" rather than "Fixed Mindset" (which often overlaps with "Results Orientated").

Yep, learn that lesson back in 2005. Been in teams where they "fire" you then outsource everything.

I had this in 2005, I moved sideways after being bored with development into business development as a product specialist. Harrowing to see all the development staff made redundant. The old head of the unit made a consultancy of it, hiring the staff and then subcontracting. Literally a year or so later they asked if I would TPM the product because I had both the understanding of the customers and the product technicals - because they'd lost the staff. Then the "problem" members of the org chain tried to outsource the development team, causing a complete loss of technical capability. That meeting that set me down the exit route was me making that point and the CEO loosing his **** with the problematical members of the org chain (who just so happened to be my bosses). The CEO turned to the CTO in that meeting and asked "Why did we make them redundant only to hire them all back in because the outsourced staff were so bad?"..

The reality is there will always be a commercial slope. It moved from the UK, to Poland/Estonia, to India and now moves to other locations. How far that slope will carry seems to be limited by the skillsets required in IT and the timescale obsolescence of technology. Perhaps the speed of change is an IT developers best weapon.