When Oracle cut scores of jobs last month, Melody Wilding, an executive coach and author, knew she was going to hear about it from her clients. For months now, the corporate professionals Wilding advises have been airing fears about losing their jobs, and their worries seem to spike “when big companies make layoff announcements,” she says. In the era of “forever” layoffs and looming dread caused by AI’s advances in automating work, her clients are plagued by “the sensation that you never can get too settled. Not only could your entire reporting structure change tomorrow, the department or the product you were working with may be gone.”
Many of the executives that New York–based Wilding coaches are in the tech field, but job insecurity has become a universal truth: The fears her clients are voicing are consistent among workers regardless of geography, job level, work type, and sector.
