By Lorna Tan
If you’ve only got a minute:
- Being financially and mentally resilient will enable you to be better prepared in the event of a retrenchment.
- Take this period of unemployment as a time to reflect on your career and life goals.
Driven by business restructuring, retrenchments in Singapore more than doubled to 2,990 in 4Q2022 from the preceding quarter (1,300).
And the job cuts have continued into this year. In total, there were 6,440 retrenchments in 2022.
This is also seen worldwide. Besides Facebook parent Meta, which retrenched 11,000 employees worldwide, other big tech firms – such as Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, Sea and Carousell – have done the same.
Retrenchment is a form of dismissal from your job but likely through no fault of yours. It happens when firms need to reduce head count due to reorganisation, redundancy, cost reduction, or industry changes.
While most people are often caught off guard when they are retrenched, more people are realising that it is a possibility that can happen to anyone, and not just to mature workers above a certain age.
Being financially and mentally resilient will enable you to be better prepared for such curveballs that threaten to derail our financial plan and life goals.
For instance, having sufficient emergency cash of at least 3 to 6 months of expenses will come in handy during rainy days and avoid the undesirable scenario of having to sell off insurance policies and/or investments at the wrong price and time, just to raise cash.