Relaunch Your Career

If you are looking to be made redundant, it helps to be able to identify factors which typically mark out individuals and teams as ripe for redundancy. The obvious factors include:

• Being in a division or department that is not meeting revenue, profit or growth targets
• Being in a market segment that is shrinking, disappearing or being replaced
• Being one of two or more departments doing similar work
• Having skills that are less in demand than they were last year, for instance skills in older technologies
• Being in a skill area that cannot easily be adapted to take on new tasks.

There are also a whole host of rather less well acknowledged factors which may make individuals more attractive candidates for redundancy, although these will never be acknowledged by litigation-conscious organisations. They include:

• People who earn significantly more than others at their grade, or are graded relatively highly for the job they are in
• People whose viewpoint on key issues differs significantly from that of their peers or management line
• People who have been involved in internal complaints or disputes, even if they were entirely blameless
• People who have had significant health issues in recent years, even if these were as a result of work injury
• People who have caring responsibilities
• People who are or have been on maternity leave.

You would think that individuals with a track record of poor achievement would also be valid targets for redundancy. Under the new HR rules, it is much more likely that, even in organisations with a ‘no redundancy’ policy, these employees will be managed out of the organisation using performance management rules, without any redundancy package at all. You can read more on this in the section on being under threat of redundancy.