The email went out on a Tuesday morning in late October 2025. Fourteen thousand Amazon employees opened their inbox and found out their corporate jobs were gone, part of a round that had been rumored at up to 30,000 in the days before. I have spent thirty years leading complex, cross-division projects and coaching leaders through disruption, and this round hit differently. It was not an isolated event. It was one more wave in a year that saw more than 120,000 tech jobs eliminated across roughly 260 companies, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi. UPS cut 48,000 positions in the same year. Target, Salesforce, Microsoft, and dozens of others followed similar paths.

I wrote about the Amazon cuts on LinkedIn shortly after they happened, and the conversation that followed taught me more than my original post did. What follows is not that post. It is what I have learned since, watching several clients live through exactly this.

What a Layoff Actually Costs, Beyond the Job

Start with what does not show up on a severance letter. Skills built over years do not disappear with a layoff notice, but the sense of who you are at work often does, at least for a while. One person described it to me as being thrown off a cliff into open water and told to figure out how to swim. That image has stuck with me because it captures something most career advice skips past: the disorientation is not weakness, it is a rational response to having your professional identity yanked out from under you without warning.

The unease spreads past the people directly affected. Everyone left behind starts scanning the org chart differently, wondering how secure their own role really is. A meaningful share of the current wave is tied directly to AI investment. Amazon’s own cuts were framed partly around funding automation. In that climate, something close to imposter syndrome shows up everywhere, from new hires to VPs, and almost nobody is immune to it right now.

The System Question Nobody Fully Answers

One client asked me something I have not been able to answer cleanly: with this many people competing for a shrinking pool of open roles, how much can the current support systems actually absorb? It is a fair challenge, and I do not think anyone has a complete answer. Unemployment benefits, retraining programs, and networking platforms all help at the margins, but none of them were built for simultaneous disruption at this scale. What I have seen work, in practice, is smaller and more local than any system: peer groups built around real accountability, informal mentorship between people navigating similar transitions, and a willingness to ask for help before the money runs out rather than after.

What Actually Moves the Needle

I have watched a handful of approaches consistently separate the clients who land well from the ones who stall. The first is separating your sense of worth from your title, which sounds obvious and is genuinely hard to practice under pressure. Journaling specific wins, not vague reassurance, is one of the few tools that reliably helps with this. Working with a coach or therapist during a transition is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is one of the more effective ways to keep perspective while the ground is still moving.

The second is treating the layoff as a redirect rather than a verdict, and doing the unglamorous work of mapping transferable skills against where the market is actually headed, whether that is AI governance, sustainability, or another emerging area entirely. The clients who do this early tend to move faster than the ones who wait for clarity to arrive on its own.

The third is staying visible in a way that does not depend on any single platform or system. Building your emergency fund before you need it, knowing your severance and COBRA terms cold, and showing up in person at industry meetups or your professional chapter, not just online, all compound in ways that are hard to see until you need them.

Where This Leaves Us

This moment is forcing a real reckoning with what career security even means anymore. Agility on its own is not enough without some kind of support structure around it, and that gap between individual effort and systemic support is not going to close on its own. What I can say with confidence is that empathy is the right starting point, both for yourself and for anyone in your circle who has been hit. If someone you know is navigating this right now, a short message costs you nothing and can mean a great deal.

If you are in the middle of a transition like this, I would be glad to talk it through.