Transitions - Laid Off

I meant to write an article about this a long time ago, but I ended up getting rather distracted and never putting it together. This is an article about getting laid off in March of this year and how I transitioned to my new job a few weeks later.

 First off – getting laid off was not the only thing going on in my life when it happened. I was married in January of 2011 to my sweet wife Ashley (my greatest accomplishment in life was wooing her heart over our short dating/engagement period of about 6 months). I registered to take the professional engineering exam in April of 2011 – and found out my wife and I were pregnant with twins shortly before that. I was scheduled to sit for the professional engineering exam (an 8-hour full day test I had been dreading from the time I was first made aware of it in college) on October 27^th. My baby girls were officially due on October 13^th, and I was also finishing out my Masters in Business Administration in December of 2011. The twins were born on 9/23/11, I took my P.E. on 10/27/11 and graduated with my MBA in 12/2011. I heard back that I had passed the P.E. in December as well. I was laid off 3 months later in March of 2012.

Adding to all of this, I had bought a foreclosure in Collierville which was well-known as a bachelor pad for most of the 3 years prior to me being married. With the aid of my father, we furiously spent our weekends attempting to make my bachelor pad into a home suitable for my family prior to Ashley’s due date.

 Now that I've set the scene:

 I was already aware that my company was doing poorly – work got slower and slower and it was tough to stay busy. Our department was seemingly way overstaffed and from what I could tell the company had been poorly managed for some time. I had started as an intern in 2007 and had been working for around 5 years when a board member walked over to my desk and asked me to come with him. I joined 2 younger engineers from different depatments and instantly realized I was being laid off as I could think of no other reason the other 2 young engineers, two board members and I would all be in a meeting together. My head got hot – stress instantly rose within me and I began frantically thinking about how my life was about to change tremendously.

 There are many reasons for why I was chosen to be laid off, I’m sure – I don’t feel that is relatively important to this article – so I am purposely leaving that out.

Thankfully when I walked into that last meeting at Allen and Hoshall my wife and I had been contemplating for some time paying off her new honda civic and the only reason I hadn’t up till then was because I was worried there would be layoffs soon at my current job. That caused us to have a healthy amount of money in our safety fund and I knew we would be okay for the short term. I was told I would be paid to the end of the month – I think that was about 28 days when you factored in my untaken 2 weeks of vacation pay. Since I was a little worried about layoffs I had recently burned every possible piece of data I might ever want from the company servers onto a collection of 9 dvd’s and had stashed them at home. I had also already been very discontent at my job and had been looking pretty seriously into finding a new job for some time, had met with a technical recruiter who helped me revise my resume and had already looked into several leads unsuccessfully. The very last thing I believe was God’s total favor being that I had stumbled upon an audiobook copy of a book called “what color is your parachute” and had listened to it very closely the previous week. This book is all about preparing for being laid off, and it really helped me to think very critically about my possible plan while I was calm and unhappily employed the week prior to being laid off.

  

Immediately after hearing the news and prior to collecting my things, I called my wife and told her the news. Her reaction astonished me… she simply asked “why did they lay you off?” as she was rather surprised. I told her I wasn’t sure, and I loved her and would be home as soon as I could be. She didn’t sound worried at all, and looking back now I know she wasn’t. She knew the whole time that God had plans much greater than ours. That he knew when he gave us the twins what we would need, and he would be our provider. She simply knew that God watched us closely, and he was aware of our situation. That conversation was the absolute best way for her to help me in that moment and it was exactly what I needed from her. It was amazing and made me smile in one of the darkest looking days I have ever seen.

 I packed up my jeep, and drove home – after a few minutes of total bliss realizing that I would never have to return to my dreaded old job – I prayed out loud for a few minutes then picked up my phone and started calling everyone I knew that might know of anything. I told them my situation, what I was looking for, and asked them to please let me know if they heard of anything that might fit. I had quite a few soft leads after that first day and spent most of that night at home looking online and updating my profile on job search sites and emailing out my new resume with a new fresh cover letter. During the meeting where I got laid off one of the board members had told me he was aware of a couple companies looking for a mechanical engineer and wrote their numbers down for me.

After a couple days, and absolutely exhausting all of my contacts – even posting my situation on Facebook, I had 4 pretty good opportunities lining up. I began interviewing the following Wednesday, and had 3 interviews at companies I wasn’t very excited about before I had scheduled an hour long phone interview with the company I really wanted to pan out. I had actually already sent in my application and spoken with HR at Barnhart about 3 months prior to being laid off, but I had seemingly been brushed off and nobody really told me why. I sent in my resume again, and one of the people I had emailed called me and told me to look at Barnhart. This was one of my favorite MBA professors at Union, Keven Westbrook.

 Amazingly so, Keven had recently started training the sales staff at Barnhart and had a pretty solid relationship with some important people at Barnhart. He called to ask why they hadn’t hired me already, and the human capital VP gave me a call that night and set up the hour long phone interview. During our phone interview I remember him saying if we had gone to college at the same time we would have been best friends. We had very similar background, both coming from reformed Presbyterian churches and our thoughts on everything lined up perfectly. I told him I had a few other offers to look at and he told me he felt pretty certain he wanted me to come to Barnhart quickly, and I could come in the following week for a face-to-face interview.

  

In the meantime I had interviewed with 3 other companies, and had firm offers from 2 – each for substantially more than I was making previously. The stress had already started to subside and excitement was building quickly. My interview at Barnhart was intense, I interviewed with 6 senior engineers for 45 minutes each – and left feeling good about things, but mentally exhausted after telling my story to 6 different highly intelligent men. I took an engineering aptitude test that had 5 questions on it – 3 of which I solved easily and 2 of which I had no idea how to solve but did my best to show I knew how to set up problems really well… I was moving from a background in refrigeration to a completely new field much more kin to steel design and civil engineering type work.

 That Friday Barnhart sent me my official offer letter and I called and accepted. They said I could come to work whenever I liked, I told them instead of coming the very next Monday – I wanted to take another week to enjoy with my wife since I hadn't really enjoyed the prior 2 weeks since I was so stressed.

  

After all of this I don’t feel this is exactly the typical layoff story. I don’t feel anything I did really prepared me for this or helped me to get through it faster. I really think God ordained everything and I am so greatful he had a wonderful plan that brought me to where I am today. I calculated it later – Allen and Hoshall ended up paying me for 28 days after I was laid off – I started at Barnhart on the 29^th day. God watches us closely.