Surviving a Layoff: A Week-By-Week Guide to Getting Your Life Back Together

This book is about how to survive a layoff/getting fired. The best story in the book is a true story about an employee who actually sees her termination letter on her boss' computer, and she spends the entire day collecting contacts and project snippets so that she is escorted out the building by a security guard, she has a disk of all the handy information she needs to get another job. Her boss fired her because he wanted to hire a buddy instead. It can happen at any time, (unless you're self-employed), so the author is basically saying: BE PREPARED. The least useful chapter, in my opinion, was the "Life after Layoff", where the author starts to analyze personality types and examine the "cycles" of depression, etc, that people suffer after getting fired. I thought this section could have been summarized in 3 pages and was needlessly long. I also thought that the last chapter, "Do You Really Want To Go Back to The Rat Race" should have been expanded a great deal-- it was about the decision whether or not to become self-employed. Economic downturns are traditionally times when people have the gumption to strike out on their own, so I felt that this chapter could have been twice as long with many more resources. Despite the drawbacks, I still think it is a useful book to anyone who has been terminated or fired and wants guidance on what to do next. The Publishing Maven

In Country Western music, sad songs about losing your job have a special niche, something a little more wistful than David Allan Coe's hearty "Take This Job and Shove It." Merle Haggard's "If We Can Make It Through December" is about a worker who gets laid off from his factory job at the end of the year. In "These Days I Barely Get By," George Jones moans that his boss plans to lay everyone off come winter. No question about it, getting laid off is even tougher to handle than losing your dog or your pick-up truck, two other sad themes in country tunes. But getting laid off also can signal a time for renewal, starting over and moving ahead in an exciting new direction. getAbstract finds that retirement expert Lita Epstein does a very solid job of showing you how to cope with life after a layoff. She explains how to make the best of a bad situation by taking practical, weekly steps. Her book will help you achieve a heads-up state of preparedness and - if you do have to pick up your guitar (or laptop) and hit that lonesome unemployment road - she tells you what song to sing next to get back in the saddle.