The two weeks after the call: what to do

The first week after the redundancy call is for stillness. Week two is when the work starts, and there is a specific order to it. I want to walk you through what to do between day eight and day fourteen, because the men I know who handled redundancy best were the ones who used these seven days well, and the men who handled it worst were the ones who either kept doing nothing (the runway burns regardless) or who tried to do everything at once and ended up with a half-finished CV, an angry lawyer, and a LinkedIn post they regretted.

Read the offer properly (and slowly)

By day eight your offer letter has been sitting in your inbox for a week. You've probably skimmed it. You haven't read it.

Print it out. Sit at the kitchen table with a pen and a highlighter. Read it three times. The first time, just read. The second time, mark anything you don't understand. The third time, mark anything that feels off.

Five things to focus on.

• Notice period. Is the package paying you out in lieu of notice, or are you working through it? The dollar value can differ significantly. Sometimes there's an option, and the tax treatment is different.
• Leave entitlements. Annual leave, long service leave, time-in-lieu, banked rostered days off. Cross-check against your last payslip. Errors here are common, sometimes ten thousand dollars or more, and they almost always favour the employer until you push back.
• Redundancy formula. Most enterprise agreements specify weeks-per-year-of-service. Check the actual formula in your agreement, not the number on the offer. Do the calculation yourself. Australian redundancy formulas are often more generous than the offer initially shows, especially for long-tenured staff.
• Restraint clauses. Read the non-compete and non-solicit carefully. Restraint clauses signed under redundancy are often legally weaker than they look, but only if you push back. If you sign without negotiation, the practical effect is whatever the document says.
• Release and waiver. Almost every redundancy offer includes a clause where you waive your right to make claims against the company. This is normal. The question is what you're waiving in exchange for what. Make sure the package is generous enough to justify the waiver.

If you find anything that looks off, don't email your former employer about it yet. Take it to a lawyer first.

Engage a lawyer for the offer review

This is the highest-return three hundred dollars you will spend this year. I mean that literally. The cost-benefit on an employment lawyer's review of a redundancy offer is better than almost any other professional service you'll buy in your career.

Most Australian employment lawyers offer a fixed-fee redundancy review for somewhere between $250 and $600. You send them the offer, your contract, and your last three payslips. They turn it around in two to three business days with a written summary of what's in the offer, what's missing, what to negotiate, and what to walk away from.

The reason this works is that employment law is local, technical, and changes frequently. Your friend who got made redundant two years ago at a different company is not a reliable source. Reddit is not a reliable source. The HR person who delivered the news has a fiduciary duty to the company, not to you, regardless of how kind they were on the call.

A good lawyer will, in roughly seventy per cent of cases I've seen, identify at least one item worth negotiating, usually worth more than the lawyer's fee. In maybe twenty per cent of cases, they identify something worth substantially more (a misapplied formula, a missed entitlement, a restraint clause that needs softening, a wrongly-tax-treated payment).

Two pieces of practical advice. Use a specialist employment lawyer, not a generalist or a family friend who does conveyancing. Ask them upfront for the fixed fee. Send them the documents on day eight or nine and you'll have their advice by day eleven or twelve.

The career-coach question

This is the question I get asked most often in week two. Should I engage a career coach?

My honest answer. Probably not in week two. Maybe in week three or four. Possibly never.

A good career coach is genuinely useful. They will help you sharpen your narrative, prepare for senior interviews, and think about positioning. The problem is that good career coaches are rare, expensive (typically $3k to $8k for a structured engagement) and most useful when you've already done the basic thinking yourself. If you engage one in week two, before you've even read your offer properly, you are paying premium rates for someone to do the thinking you should be doing yourself.

The order I'd recommend.

• Week two. Do not engage a coach yet. Do the basics yourself.
• Week three or four. If you've done the basics and you're still stuck on positioning, narrative, or how to handle a particular target market, then yes, engage a coach. Pay for a structured four-to-six session engagement, not an open-ended monthly retainer.
• Avoid. Anyone selling a "complete career programme" for $15k. Anyone whose website is mostly about transformation. Anyone who can't give you three specific senior placements they've worked on in the last twelve months.

A good coach is a tool. You use them when you have a specific problem they can fix. Don't engage one as a substitute for sitting with the discomfort of an uncertain week.

The LinkedIn delay

Do not change your LinkedIn this week. Not your headline, not your job, not your status, not your photo. Especially do not post the "I'm excited to share that I'm starting a new chapter" post. I beg you.

The right time to update LinkedIn is roughly week three to four, after you've had your offer reviewed, decided on your narrative, and quietly told your closest network. The update should be minimal and unemotional. Change your current role to "Open to opportunities" or to a holding label like "Independent Advisor" if you're going to do consulting. Don't post about the redundancy at all. Let the change of role on the profile do the speaking. People who care will reach out. People who don't, won't, and you don't need their attention.

The instinct to post is almost always about reassuring yourself rather than informing the network. The network reads it that way too. A quiet, confident profile update lands better than any post.

Update the CV (properly)

Week two is when you update the CV, but not by adding new things. By cutting old ones.

Most senior CVs are too long, too detailed, and too historical. The version you take into your forties needs to be cut back to two pages, ideally, and the work to do that takes longer than you'd think. Aim to spend three or four hours on this in week two. There's a separate piece on the full CV rewrite, but the week-two job is just to get the document up to date with your current role's outcomes and to remove anything older than fifteen years that isn't directly relevant.

Quietly map your network

This is the most important strategic work of week two, and it's almost invisible work.

Open a spreadsheet. List, by name, every person in your network who could plausibly help you find your next role. Not everyone you know. The shortlist. For most senior men this is between forty and a hundred people.

For each person, note three things. The last time you spoke. The current state of the relationship (warm, lukewarm, gone cold). What they're likely to know about (which industries, which companies, which roles).

Don't contact anyone yet. The mapping is the work this week. Contact starts in week three, in a specific order, with a specific message.

Treat this list like a fishing tackle box. Different conversations need different lures. The mate from your old company is a different conversation to the head-hunter you worked with five years ago, who is a different conversation to the friend's father who runs a board you've always admired. Sorting them by type before you start contacting them is what separates a productive week three from a scattergun one.

No public announcements

To say it once more. No LinkedIn post. No mass email. No update to the WhatsApp groups. No notification to the alumni network. No post in the industry Slack you're a member of. Nothing public this week.

The men who announce in week one or two consistently regret it. The men who hold off until week three or four consistently land better roles. The reason is simple. Public announcements lock in a narrative before you've fully chosen one, and they leak the news to a much wider audience than you actually need to hear it.

A short imperative

WORK QUIETLY. Week two is for paperwork, lawyers, lists, and CV cuts. None of it should be visible to anyone outside your household and your closest professional confidants. The visibility comes later, after the foundations are in.

Closing

Read. Review. Map. Then move.