1 out of 10

Yesterday my former employer decided to have me join the 10% of the work force that is looking for a job. I had worked for ARCADIS for 10 years and 1 month up to yesterday. Apparently company loyalty is not what it used to be.

A week ago a biologist in our office was let go. He was part of a different operations group (Permit and Planning I was in site investigation and remediation) and had been with the company for the past three years and had also been with the company in the 1990's. He had over 20 years total experience. Apparently his supervisor called him the day before to tell him that they were going to have a call on the next day. He said this didn't make him feel good. On Friday his supervisor called him, along with a person from HR and they told him he was done as of that day. His department had been light for work and he said that he had been up and down for work load, but currently was busy and had a bunch of work coming. Overall (form what I have been told) his department was reducer by about half of it employees.

So this past week the department operations manager was in the office on Thursday and Friday for a standard office meeting with everybody. On Friday when I got in around 10am after being at a job-site I noticed my supervisor was in the office. I didn't remember that she was going to be visiting on Friday. I checked my emails and no where was it mentioned that she was going to be in the office. So I went and asked her why she was in, she said it was only a short visit a adverted the question the best she could.

Around 11:15am I was siting at my cube and I saw my supervisor walking towards me, at the same time the operations manager walked out of the office he was siting in and came towards me. At this point I new already that I was done. He said they wanted to talk to me in the conference room. As we stepped into the conference room I thought they have already announced that three people in the department were promoted, so I was pretty sure that was not where this meeting was going to be heading.

They said that corporate had decided that staffing reductions were made my employment was terminated as of a result. So the years of loyalty to the company only meant more severance pay as apparently the new guy they hired one month ago was now more valuable to the company than I was. This was a nice kick in the gut.

So now it is on to looking for a new job. Maybe this will be a blessing in disguise. I need to keep a positive attitude, send out a lot of resumes and make a lot of phone calls.