When an organisation restructures, the people leaving are asking themselves one question: What do I actually have to offer, and where do I go from here?
I've been helping people answer that question for more than twenty years.
Back then, my team and I set out to help people find their path and give them the human skills to make it happen. But the model we worked in only rewarded one outcome: placing someone in a job. Everything pointed in that one direction.
Over my career, I've helped around 2,000 people find their next step. Some went into a new role. Some went contracting. Some started their own business.
I've worked with a refugee who sent 1,000 applications without a single call back, and helped him get seen. With someone who became one of the fastest hired and promoted people in a telecoms company. With an executive VP who negotiated 30% more than he'd been offered. With graduates in the depths of the recession, convinced they were invisible among thousands of applicants, who learned how to stand out. And with a returning parent who uncovered skills she didn't know she had, transferred them into a whole new industry, and excelled there.
Different people, different moments. The same truth every time: most people have no idea how many skills they actually have. So when the moment comes to move, they undersell themselves.
Recently, people who'd been made redundant started asking me: "Could I have a Skills Passport?" They didn't want another CV template. They wanted to understand themselves.
That question made me look hard at traditional outplacement. It's growing, and it exists for good reasons. But too often it offers everyone the same workshops and the same templates, at the very moment each person needs something different. It was built for a world where the next step was usually another similar job.
That world has changed. Roles are transforming fast, and there won't always be the same volume of jobs to return to. People need to be reskilled to be recruited. And for many, the next step may be consulting or building a business of their own.
As an entrepreneur my whole career, I know those paths are real. But whichever one someone chooses, the starting point is the same: know your skills, and know how to sell them.
That's why I built Global Skills Passport: skills-led career transition support that organisations can offer at scale. Employers fund it. Employees own it. Each person can:
- uncover the skills they already have,
- choose their own direction, whether employment, consulting or their own business,
- see the gap between where they are and where they want to be,
- connect to learning that helps them start closing it.
For those who want more, there's V: an AI career coach shaped by everything I've learned from those 2,000 journeys.
Employers see aggregate activation and engagement. Never individual career data. That privacy matters, because people only explore honestly when they feel safe.
How an organisation treats people on their way out says everything about who it is. It's remembered by those who leave, and watched closely by those who stay.
It's the question I explore on the Global Skills Podcast: how do we close the skills gap, future-proof people and leave no one behind?
Redundancy is where that question becomes real. When roles change, potential doesn't disappear. Global Skills Passport helps your people see it.
Vanessa Wainwright Founder, Global Skills Passport