You will be able to plan small, regular steps that shorten a future job search.
The week Jasmine's company announced its restructuring, she opened her CV for the first time in four years. It listed a job title she no longer had, skipped her two biggest projects and ran to three pages, and her LinkedIn profile was even older. She spent the weekend rewriting both, while also trying to remember the names of people she used to work with. It struck her that if she had spent an hour a quarter on this over the past four years, she would have been ready on the Monday.
Your buffer from lesson 5.3, Size a buffer for losing your job, not just for emergencies, decides how long you can afford to search. The habits in this lesson decide how long the search takes. Cutting a seven-month search to five saves two months of fixed costs, which for Jasmine's example figures is S$6,600, and nothing in this lesson costs that much.
Three things shorten the time from deciding to look for work to your first interview: a current CV, a record of recent work you can show, and an online profile that matches both.
A CV goes stale quietly. You forget the numbers behind your best results, the projects blur together, and the skills you picked up last year never get added. Updating it once a quarter takes less than an hour, while rebuilding it under pressure takes a weekend and comes out worse.
A portfolio is a set of examples that shows what you can do. For a designer or a writer it is obvious. For most other roles it can be a short document with three or four recent projects, each with the problem, what you did and what changed, with anything confidential removed. When an interviewer asks for an example, you are not relying on memory.
Your LinkedIn profile, or whichever professional profile recruiters in your field use, should tell the same story as your CV. Recruiters search these profiles every day, and one with an old job title and no recent work rarely comes up when they do.
When your company is cutting, your colleagues are in the same position as you. They cannot hire you, and they may be looking themselves. The people who can help are outside: former colleagues now at other firms, classmates in your industry, clients and suppliers, recruiters who cover your field, and people you know through industry groups or courses.
Most jobs are not filled by strangers answering adverts alone. A referral or an introduction from someone the hiring manager trusts can move you to the front of the queue. Those introductions are much easier to ask for from someone you have kept in touch with than from someone you last spoke to five years ago.
Keeping in touch does not need to be elaborate. A message when someone changes job, a coffee every few months with a former manager, a note to a recruiter when you see an interesting role. Kumar, in his recession playbook from lesson 4.5, Write your recession playbook, listed three people outside his company. Jasmine's list started with a former manager, a friend from a marketing course and a recruiter who had placed her before.
Skills are the other half of income insurance. If your role is at risk, a skill that is in demand across several employers makes your next job easier to find.
You probably have money set aside for this already. SkillsFuture Credit can be used for eligible courses, and some Singaporeans have additional credit depending on their age. Check your balance and the courses it can pay for on the MySkillsFuture portal, since amounts and eligibility rules change. Many employers also have a training budget for each employee, which often goes unused. Ask your manager or HR what yours is. Using it while you are still employed is far easier than finding the money after you leave.
Choose skills with care. Look at advertisements for roles you might want next, note the skills that keep appearing, and compare them with yours, and whatever is missing goes on your training list.
If you do lose your job, public agencies offer help with job matching, career coaching and training. Workforce Singapore runs career services for jobseekers, and the Ministry of Manpower lists support for retrenched workers. If you are a union member, NTUC and its Employment and Employability Institute also offer help. Schemes change, and some depend on your circumstances, so check what applies to you on the agencies' websites now. If you already know where to go, you can start using that help in your first week out of work.
None of this needs a big effort. An hour a quarter on your CV and profile, one coffee a month with someone outside your company, and one course a year add up to a much shorter search. The hard part is starting while things are calm, and Jasmine started with three names and one course. Your own first names are probably people you have not messaged in a while.
List three people outside your company you could contact about work this week and one skill you will refresh in the next quarter.
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