Forget quiet-quitting, if you’re enjoying your job it might be time to prepare a career cushion.
Let us explain – with a new bout of redundancies hitting our headlines every day and a recession predicted by the Bank of England, you might be worrying about your job security.
Enter career cushioning - a new work trend doing the rounds on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Career expert Catherine Fisher has defined the trend as “taking actions to keep your options open and cushioning for whatever comes next in the economy and job market. Think of it like an insurance policy to set yourself up for success.”
You might have heard of ‘cushioning’ before in the dating world - when you explore lots of different new dating options while you’re still in a relationship to ‘cushion’ the pain of a break up (regardless of whether you’re on the receiving end of one).
‘Career cushioning’ is the work equivalent of it - and it’s easy to see why people are digging the idea of having back up options in case their company goes under or they are let go.
Instead of going above and beyond in your job in order to avoid redundancy, career cushioning allows workers to stop over-exerting themselves and instead low-key start a search for a role before they have to out of necessity.
Ready to have a secret cushion? According to Fisher there are three key steps.
1. Evaluate your skills and build on any you’re missing that you’d need to land your next big job.
2. Stay connected to your network - who knows when someone might need someone exactly like you to take a role.
3. Plan out what you’d like your career to look like in the future. Get ahead of the game by thinking about where you want to go next, before you have to.
So if you’re worried about the future of your job, it might be time to get updating your LinkedIn...