What a Layoff Cannot Take From You

A friend of mine — I’ll call her Tito — is an HR Director.

Fifteen years of experience.

She has built people systems from scratch, led teams through difficult organisational change, managed complex problems and developed the kind of judgement that doesn’t come from a textbook.

Over the years, friends and family who run businesses have quietly asked her for help.

Can you look at this policy?

How should I structure my team?

How do I handle this situation?

Can you help us put proper HR systems in place?

She helps.

Usually for free.

Because to her, much of this feels almost obvious now.

It isn’t.

It feels obvious because she has spent fifteen years becoming exceptionally good at it.

And then she was made redundant.

Suddenly, the title was gone.

The organisation was gone.

The familiar structure around her expertise was gone.

But the expertise itself?

And I think that’s something more women need to understand before a redundancy, restructure or career change forces them to.

Your job and your expertise are not the same thing

For years, many of us have been taught to explain our professional value through our roles.

I’m a Marketing Director.

I’m Head of People.

I’m a Programme Manager.

I’m a Finance Director.

I’m a Senior Leader in…

There’s nothing wrong with titles.

They help organisations understand where we sit.

But a title is a container.

It isn’t the full value inside it.

Remove Tito’s HR Director title and she can still walk into a growing company, examine what’s happening with its people and identify problems the founders cannot see.

She can still build systems.

She can still navigate difficult conversations.

She can still lead change.

She can still recognise patterns because she has seen versions of them before.

That’s professional capital.

And if you’ve spent 10, 15, 20 or 25 years working, you probably have far more of it than you’ve ever counted.

We count responsibilities. We don’t always count results.

Ask an experienced woman what she does and she’ll often give you her job description.

She manages this.

Leads that.

Oversees this.

Is responsible for that.

But ask a different set of questions:

What became better because you were there?

What problem did you solve?

What did you build that didn’t exist before?

What did you fix?

What did you make faster, simpler, safer or more profitable?

What happened because of a decision you made?

Who became better because you led them?

What do people specifically come to you for?

Now we’re having a very different conversation.

Because those answers aren’t simply responsibilities.

They’re evidence.

And evidence travels.

There are things your employer owns. And things they don’t.

Your employer may own the company.

The product.

The internal documents.

The confidential information.

The proprietary systems.

And, of course, anything subject to your employment agreements and intellectual-property obligations needs to remain where it belongs.

But your employer does not own every lesson you’ve learned from becoming excellent at your profession.

They don’t own your judgement.

They don’t own your lived experience.

They don’t own your reputation.

They don’t own the relationships you’ve legitimately built.

They don’t own your ability to recognise a problem.

They don’t own your leadership.

They don’t own the way fifteen years of experience has taught you to think.

And they don’t own the next thing you decide to do with those capabilities.

That’s the distinction I wish more women made before they needed to make it.

Your methodology may be hiding inside what you call “common sense”

This one fascinates me.

Ask someone who has been excellent at something for years how they do it and they’ll often say:

“I don’t know. I just know what to look for.”

No.

You didn’t emerge from the womb knowing how to restructure a department.

You learned.

You tried things.

You watched things fail.

You noticed patterns.

You made mistakes.

You developed questions you now know to ask.

You learned which signals matter and which ones don’t.

Eventually, all those individual lessons became judgement.

And because that judgement now happens quickly in your head, you’ve started calling it instinct.

But somewhere inside that “instinct” may be a methodology.

A sequence.

A framework.

A diagnostic process.

A philosophy.

A way of seeing the problem that is distinctly yours.

That’s intellectual property in its earliest form.

The challenge is extracting it from your head.

This is where authority begins

Not with posting on LinkedIn every day.

Not with picking three brand colours.

Not with having a photoshoot.

Authority begins when you can name what you know.

When you can take years of experience and articulate:

Here’s the problem I understand.

Here’s what I’ve learned about it.

Here’s how I approach it.

Here’s what I’ve done.

Here’s what happened as a result.

Here’s what I believe that others in my field may see differently.

Here’s who this knowledge could help.

That’s when experience starts becoming visible expertise.

Tito’s colleagues knew she was brilliant.

Her manager knew.

The friends whose businesses she’d helped knew.

But beyond those circles?

Very few people had any idea.

Her expertise existed.

Her authority hadn’t travelled with it yet.

Visibility is not vanity

I think this is particularly important for women who have spent years letting the work speak for itself.

Because sometimes it does.

Inside the organisation.

People learn your name.

Your reputation travels through meetings.

Someone says, “Ask Padebi.”

“Get Tito involved.”

“She’ll know what to do.”

That’s an internal reputation system.

The problem comes when you leave the building.

The new market doesn’t have access to those conversations.

They weren’t in the meeting where you solved the impossible problem.

They didn’t watch you rescue the project.

They don’t know that three executives already call you when they get stuck.

You have to make some of that expertise legible outside the organisation.

That isn’t showing off.

It’s translation.

Your work has to be able to travel without you being physically present in every room.

That might mean writing.

Speaking.

Teaching.

Publishing your ideas.

Developing a framework.

Building a body of work.

Sharing case studies where confidentiality allows.

Creating a point of view around the problems you understand deeply.

Not because everybody needs to become an influencer.

And no, the answer isn’t automatically “start a business”

This is where my thinking has evolved.

If Tito had asked me a few years ago what she should do next, I might have immediately seen a consultancy.

And she absolutely could build one.

But that isn’t the only valuable outcome.

Maybe she wants another executive role — except this time she enters the market with a body of thought leadership behind her.

Maybe she wants board positions.

Maybe she wants to consult one day a week.

Maybe she wants to speak.

Maybe she wants to teach.

Maybe she develops an HR framework and licenses it.

Maybe she builds a digital product.

Maybe she creates a portfolio career.

Maybe she takes another job and decides she loves being employed.

The point isn’t entrepreneurship.

The point is ownership.

When you understand what you’ve accumulated, you have more choices about what happens next.

And options are a form of wealth too.

AI can help you extract it. It cannot give it to you.

This is one place where I think AI becomes genuinely interesting for an experienced professional.

Not because ChatGPT suddenly makes everybody an expert.

It doesn’t.

But because AI can help you interrogate, organise and articulate expertise you’ve spent years accumulating.

Imagine giving an AI tool a detailed account of ten projects you’ve led and asking it:

What patterns appear in the problems I solve?

What capabilities keep showing up?

What methodology seems to underpin the way I work?

What outcomes have I repeatedly created?

What might I be taking for granted because I’ve done it for so long?

Suddenly, AI isn’t being used to manufacture expertise.

It’s helping you mine your own.

That’s the kind of AI I’m interested in.

Technology as leverage for something deeply human.

Your experience comes first.

The engine helps you do more with it.

So what should Tito do next?

Before the CV.

Before another certification.

Before deciding she needs to reinvent herself completely.

I’d give her a blank document and ask her to make four lists.

Then I’d ask one final question:

Where else could this professional capital create value?

Don’t rush to answer it.

Because the answer might be another job.

Or a boardroom.

Or a consultancy.

Or a business.

Or a book.

Or a stage.

Or something you haven’t considered yet.

The important thing is recognising that you’re not standing there empty-handed.

Take inventory before you start again

A layoff can take your salary.

It can take your title.

It can take your routine.

It can take the email address you’ve used for seven years and the Monday morning meeting you complained about every Sunday night.

It can close a chapter before you were ready for it to close.

I won’t romanticise that.

Losing a role can be disruptive, frightening and deeply personal.

But there are things it cannot take unless you fail to recognise that they belong to you.

Your experience.

Your judgement.

Your results.

Your relationships.

Your reputation.

Your methodology.

Your perspective.

Your ability to solve problems you’ve already solved before.

So whether you’ve been made redundant, you’re considering leaving, or you’re perfectly happy where you are today, perhaps it’s worth taking inventory now.

Don’t wait until an organisation changes your circumstances to discover what you’ve spent years accumulating.

And wherever you go next, you get to build with that.

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