
Finding Purpose After Redundancy: What Happy Workers Taught Me About My Career
Now What? - Life after redundancyShow Notes
Redundancy will have you questioning everything — your career, your skills, and whether you should finally run away to join the world of professional yodelling. So in this episode, I dive into a brilliant r/UKJobs thread where real people share the jobs they genuinely love. Their stories — from pilots to librarians to people who somehow enjoy spreadsheets — helped me rethink my own direction and figure out why sticking with my field might actually make sense (for me, my sanity, and my children’s unreasonable addiction to Weetabix). If you're feeling lost, job-hunting, or just want reassurance that you're not the only one Googling “jobs that don’t require me to be a morning person,” this episode is your companion. Expect honesty, humour, and a surprisingly uplifting look at finding purpose after everything goes sideways. Perfect for anyone navigating redundancy, career changes, imposter syndrome, or the general chaos of being a functioning adult.
More from Now What? - Life after redundancy
After the best part of a year and somewhere north of a hundred applications, I've been offered a role and this episode is the honest version of what that actually feels like, recorded a while before I've even started, with none of the hindsight smoothed in yet.
There's a particular kind of unlucky where one thing goes wrong and you can just about laugh about it. Then there's Dan Roberts's 2025, where the wrong things queued up to take turns; right up until the week he finally caught a break and then redundancy turned up two days later like it had been waiting for an invite.
Most people navigating redundancy have spent years being good at their jobs. The doing was never really the problem. The bit that catches people out is the presenting — interview panels, networking rooms, video calls with recruiters — where suddenly you have to articulate your value out loud, to strangers, in real time, without your brain quietly filing everything under unavailable.
Most people treat a recruiter like a fire extinguisher — ignore it completely until something's on fire, then hope it works first time. In this episode, I'm joined by Neil Johns, Director at Merje, a specialist recruitment business working with everyone from startups and FinTechs through to national banking groups and global organisations, to find out what the job search actually looks like from the other side of the desk.
The salary conversation is one of the most anxiety-producing moments in any job search — and when you're coming from redundancy, it's even more loaded. Your last salary exists but it may not reflect what the market currently pays. The pressure of needing a role changes what you're willing to say out loud. And the advice available is either negotiation-bro overconfident or so hedged it's useless.