I got laid off as part of a fourth round of layoffs in the last six months at my (previous) company.
The signs were there. I had a strong feeling it was coming, and I think a lot of other employees knew it too, but no one wanted to speak it into existence.
I think we all were just hoping it was later rather than sooner.
This round was over 30% of the company's workforce, totaling over 300 employees.
Yikes.
It's that guessing game of dreading if it's actually coming, and then praying it's not you if it does.
All in all, I'm thankful for the opportunity. It was a WILD two years that honestly felt like five. I gained many new skills and experience, I made tons of connections and some lifelong friends.
When I got hired on an Assistant Office Manager in May of 2021 (my actual title was different, but this is the easiest way to explain it) I initially interviewed for a different role on a referral, to which I was beat out.
But when I received the call that I didn't get the role I interviewed for, they told me to come back to interview for the Assistant Office Manager position which I ended up taking.
In everything that I do, I prioritize the people I work with and the relationships I have with them. While my work is important to me, it will always be second to the people I do my work with.
Because at the end of the day, people aren't going to remember you for how quickly you can get reports to them (or at least I pray that's not how I get remembered) but they will remember what it was like working with you. Actually caring about the people you're working with and getting to know them for who they are outside of work. Taking a genuine interest for the people behind the work.
And as I detailed this during my interviews, I think this is how I was considered for the other open role as an Assistant Office Manager, where I could build relationships with the employees that worked in the same office as I would.
It wasn't quite what I was hoping for at the time, but I knew at my core what I enjoyed and what I wanted to do, as to this day it still revolves around helping and being around people.
At the time, the company was growing exponentially and rapidly, putting all other "high-paced environments" to rest. They onboarded on average 50+ employees a week for nearly a year straight, so maybe with time there would be somewhere else in the company I could go.
My background is in Training and Development, and while that wasn't a department at the time, I hoped there would be one in the future.
So I said sure, I'll take this opportunity. It's a new challenge.
And good grief, am I thankful I took that role.
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I started my role by doing a lot of the mundane tasks around the office - restocking stacks, cleaning conference rooms, fixing the printers, moving heavy equipment, etc. Essentially, I took care of any little task that no one else wanted to do.
It was a very solemn, sterile office as it was primarily made up of biologists and engineers of sorts. Everyone was siloed where they only talked to their direct team members and no one else. Everyone kept their heads down and worked without a word.
And I -
I did not like that one bit.
So with time, I found someone else in the office who didn't like it one bit either.
My partner in crime.
For the sake of anonymity, I will not name this unsung hero, who one day will probably give an unannounced speech at my future wedding after having juuuuuuuuust a few drinks. But for context, this guy was working Inventory in the back office in the shipping and receiving area. (For those of you that know, you know exactly who I'm talking about now.)
Naturally, I'd always walk in to inventory to find him chatting up the transport driver or someone passing by.
It was easy to lose track of time with him, because this dude can keep a conversation naturally flowing better than anyone I've ever met.
He could turn a 5 minute chat into an hour, and it would only feel like you were talking to him for 15 minutes. If you got him going enough, he could make you laugh harder than any stand up comedian could that'd make you pay $100 for a show.
One day, we got to talking for too long as we normally did, and I said, "this office is way too quiet," in which he agreed.
And it was then, that we decided we were going to do something about it to change it.
So we went around the entire office that week and made it a goal to talk to every single person.
Now the office was an open-space concept, so it was honestly pretty easy to start a conversation with someone, and what I noticed was that if we got a chat going, more and more people started looking over either in annoyance or in curiosity.
You were on a call? No worries, we'll come snake back around. It didn't have to be long, but we were gonna talk to everyone.
It was like putting a new toy that moves on its own in front of a cat - sometimes their eyes light up, wondering the possibilities of this new contraption and ready to play, or they get all worked scrunched up in defense mode and hesitance as if to say "What is this and why are you messing with my peace?"
Some folks warmed right up to our initiative of trying to get the office more friendly, as if they were waiting for someone to start it, yet no one wanted to.
Others would nod in acknowledgment that they realized our existence or we'd get a quiet "Hello" - the real introverts. And that's totally fine, not everyone wants to talk.
But I noticed with time even some of these folks warmed up and maybe weren't chatterboxes, but I could tell that they felt more comfortable coming to me with asks for help or just being more friendly with their teammates.
We had intramural sports leagues that we played in where a lot of us bonded closely, and I brought in a personal speaker to play music in the office first thing in the morning and had a running Google Form for song suggestions.
My partner in crime loved sitting at the kitchen table at breakfast and lunch that intersected the main office and the hallway to the bathrooms. He talked the ears off of any poor soul that ever made eye contact with him.
I learned the IT team in the other corner of the office was a fun bunch too.
One particular IT engineer was a walking textbook of pickup lines, in which I made it a daily occurrence to walk back to their corner to say hello and hear the new pickup line of the day that he'd practice on me. He always started the same, with "Hey.." in such a tone that I knew exactly what was to follow. (And to this day, even two years later, he still is coming up with never-heard-before one-liners.)
I stayed in that role grinding away to various office needs and assimilating myself that I became a vital part of the office. I became everyone's problem solver and subject matter expert (SME) on general knowledge. If I didn't know the answer to something, I knew who you needed to talk to for the answer. I was someone everyone could rely on.
In fact, with time I became so reliant on by everyone that I never could have consistent work time for myself. One day, I kept getting interrupted for help so many times that I put a timer on my phone to see how long I could sit at my desk without someone approaching me for help.
My record was 9 minutes, 47 seconds. For the eight hour day.
With time I got a promotion to a better title and more responsibility, but essentially the same work. While I enjoyed my role, I got tired of it, and wanted something new, something I really wanted to make a career out of.
One day, I saw that we hired a Director of Talent Development and DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.)
Curiosity, peaked.
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I reached out to introduce myself and to learn more about this newly formed team. My background was in Training and Development prior to joining the company, so I knew this would be something I'd be really interested in.
With time, I grew to have a great relationship with Beth, learning about Talent Development (or Learning & Development, a fairly interchangeable title) and what the plans were to develop new learning programs for the company.
And with time, when an open Learning & Development Specialist role for the team was posted, I interviewed and Beth became my senior manager.
I still remember her breaking the news to me on a Zoom meeting - she had put a quick meeting time on my calendar titled "Chat about L&D" and I thought she was going to tell me I got passed on.
In the meeting she asked me how I felt after interviewing with everyone and I said, "Ya know, I think I interviewed as best as I could but I know there's other internal candidates that interviewed that have more experience than me, so I did what I could, and I'm thankful you gave me the opportunity to interview."
To which she responded, "Well, don't count yourself out, because you got it."
".....What?"
"You got the role."
Jaw, dropped.
I literally did not believe it for a solid two minutes.
And let me tell you, what an absolute blessing to join that team was.
We were a self-proclaimed "tiny, but mighty" team of 5, but for Talent Development exclusively (as DEIB was also an umbrella under Beth) we were a team of 3.
I was the only male on our team, and while yes at times I became hypersensitive to it, it gave me insights into a few things:
1.) This is how many women working in Corporate America feel when they're the only female on a team (or in a meeting room) full of men, and
2.) That I was surrounded by incredibly smart, talented, and experienced women who I genuinely learned something new from every single day.
And they welcomed me in with open arms.
I've been on some high-performing teams in my life - sports teams that won championships, other workplace teams that were very effective - but this clear as day was one of the best teams and highest-performing teams I've ever been apart in my life.
We made 5 feel like 30.
We owned all the aspects of Talent Development, Talent Management, learning programs, and everything surrounding DEIB.
This was my first role in Talent Development. I've worked previous roles in Training for customers and a contract role for training employees remotely on a new customer information system, but in terms of growth & development like in Learning & Development - this is what I was wanting to really get in to.
But this - this was the "big leagues." The "Show." The real deal of seeing it all work together on a macro and micro scale.
At first, it was daunting and overwhelming. It taught me that I had so, so much to learn.
I struggled with balancing projects, understanding the processes and how they worked, and honestly feeling like I belonged. I felt like I had zero relevant experience to bring to the table towards our projects.
Imposter Syndrome dial turned up to 110%.
Add on the fact that I've always struggled with truly believing in myself (and when I have, it's from being the smart guy and knowing what I know) and this really deflated my confidence.
So with that, a lot of my time in this role was in a learning mindset.
I made plenty of mistakes along the way. I had been so used to "your work, my work" in previous companies where I took pride in the quality of my work, and got really down on myself early on as I viewed the mass edits (and at times, complete re-writes) as failures, and not learning from making the same mistakes over and over again.
But this team taught me what it means to be open, vulnerable, and authentic- because I learned yeah, we all made mistakes. It's something I wasn't used to seeing, everyone being so open that we're not always perfect.
And in fact, I learned how that collaborating together really brought the best out of everyone's work and minimized potential errors.
We took the term "collaborate" to the next level.
What I saw is that we all asked for feedback all the time on everything - everyone, even our director Beth asked for reviews to our team all the time. And to those not acclimated to that kind of collaboration, yes it's daunting, as we were all working on multiple projects at the same time, so there was always a number of those requests.
But that's how it should be. Another set of fresh eyes can provide new ideas to things you may be stuck on, or catch simple mistakes you may not see when you're staring at the same document or presentation for the three hours.
Peer reviews work.
And with time, I did learn - I grew more comfortable in my abilities, understanding, and caught on to why I kept making the same mistakes. Short, sweet, and to the point works best. (Well, looking at the length of this entry, I still can improve on that.) Just because I like to be extremely detailed, doesn't mean everyone else does too.
Looking back at it now at the big picture, and seeing what we accomplished in a year's time, we did it ALL and more.
I now understand a full talent management lifecycle.
Our team initiated, executed and educated not only myself but the company on how to effectively manage talent through a talent management lifecycle, including goal setting, ongoing career conversations, and performance management.
I know how to create effective surveys for quantitative and qualitative HR data. Which for those working in HR / People & Culture / L&D, know that this may be one of the hardest things to do in our field is to create meaningful, effective metrics to support your initiatives.
Our team created a lifecycle for employee feedback surveys, and we conducted the company's first-ever employee engagement survey with an 80% completion rate on the first try. We held training sessions for managers and even C-suites to understand the results and guides for how to action plan and follow through for real, meaningful change based on results.
Our team created resources for leaders and managers to better the company, through forums to talk about upcoming initiatives, how to prepare for them, and ask questions they may have about the processes, as well as leadership development programs to focus on developing manager skillsets, like our in-house created Manager Development Program. (Big shoutout Brittany!)
I know how to implement and manage a LMS.
Add on the fact I nearly single-handedly implemented our company's first centralized LMS from scratch in a span of less than six months, while learning how to run and operate a LMS for the first time at the same time while implementing.
There's not many 25-year olds in the Learning & Development field who have the same experience and opportunities to learn like I've had, and to that I'm so thankful that Beth and the team took the chance on me.
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Yeah, getting the email that you've been laid-off sucks, but if anything this just makes me more assured in myself that I ought to listen to and trust my gut more often. I have every reason to be confident in my experience and my knowledge - and most importantly, my ability to learn and adapt as needed, quickly.
I'm extremely grateful for all the connections and experience I've gained over the last two years, and wish my friends and colleagues that are still employed all the best. It definitely feels weird again not being employed, but at least I'm going to feel a heck of a lot more confident in myself walking in to whatever role I land next.
I could go on and on about great stories and lessons learned, but I'll end it here for now. #ThankCue
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