Professional looking person with graphs and career pathway charts in background

Four Months in Mid-Life Employment Limbo

I was made redundant 4 months ago today.

31 March: I executed the traditional farewell ritual of the mid-career professional: an almost-imperceptible shrug in the general direction of the photocopier and a short walk to the car park. No speeches, no novelty cake, not even a limp balloon. Just me, a cardboard box and the sort of existential soundtrack you normally get in French cinema.

1 April: New month, new life. I was up with the larks, pounding the cross-trainer in a heroic attempt to sculpt a “new me”. Resistance machines were conquered, endorphins flowed, and—for a glorious forty-eight hours—I was basically the poster child for Mid-Life Reinvention.

3 April: Doughnuts happened. Then ice cream. If Ben & Jerry ever need to boost quarterly sales, they should simply make more fifty-somethings redundant; we’ll do the heavy lifting.

Fast-forward four months: zero salary, zero job, and—rather paradoxically—a very busy diary. I’ve uploaded a few LinkedIn posts and articles, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. It turns out that finding work in 2025 is very different from the last time I was in the job market. That was when Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school, Elon Musk had yet to be fired from PayPal, and Google was a long way from becoming a verb.

So what’s it actually like, drifting through middle-age employment limbo with a gym membership you no longer use and a freezer full of salted-caramel regret?

It’s actually not too bad, apart from the whole zero salary thing.

The Numbers Game

And I’m not alone. Exiting a professional job in your fifties (unwillingly) is not a rare occurrence, especially in 2025.

To figure out what happens next, I turned not to necromancy or tarot cards but to statistics and data visualisation. I’ve done a little research, the sources for which you’ll find at the end of this article. There isn’t a single definitive source of data so I’ve extracted some figures and done some careful extrapolation. And guesswork.

Figure 1. Career Pathways After Redundancy at 50+

Should I be worried that after 4 months I don’t have a job - any job? Not really. Only 14% of my age group have another professional job within 3 months of leaving the old one. Another 14% are in lower paid work, and 7% say they’re “self-employed”, but two thirds are still jobless.

This jobless figure does drop and two years after redundancy only 20% are unemployed, although long term this goes up to nearly a third.

Should I be concerned that the odds are against me: I have a less than evens chance of landing in a professional job sometime in the next few years?

Understanding the Odds

Some people resist any discussion of probability, preferring an unexamined optimism that screens out unfavourable statistics. I take the opposite view: the more granular the data—baseline rates, confidence intervals, omitted caveats—the better. Equipped with that information, we can assess alternatives rationally rather than intuitively.

For me, this is what it means to beat the odds. It is not a matter of willing a coin to land heads or expecting double-sixes on demand; it is a systematic appraisal of the distribution of outcomes under different courses of action and an informed adjustment of strategy in light of those probabilities.

Chance remains a constant, but its impact can be moderated when we understand, rather than ignore, the numbers.

There’s much more to say about what these figures tell us, but even I know that an article full of numbers should be brief.

Your Turn

How did your own post-redundancy odds play out? Drop a note below—stats or stories equally welcome.

Sources