“You got fired and wound up with better pay and bennies? “
The trick is being ready to move. The problem with many younger people today is they feel entitled to whatever level of pay they were at, but they don’t want to move. You have to go wherever the jobs are. (However, when I hit my late fifties the final time I got fired was it for regular employment. I did get eighteen months on contract doing a job that had become political poison for the company that had the contract. I loved the heck out of it, though.) But at the time during the Obama cluster fluck suddenly it was VERY hard to get any employment in my field. I ended up retired early.
What you can do and when and for how much is often a product of what your industry and the economy are doing at the time. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Hey, I know what you mean about going where the jobs are. I retired from the Army back in March 1992. Because I had a bunch of leave time built up, I was able to leave on what we called “terminal leave” in the middle of December. While on leave, you are basically gone, retired. But if a war broke out you could immediately be brought right back. But I went job hunting. I had two daughters and myself to look after. I had been a single dad for five years and needed a job to support us along with my retired pay (nowhere enough to support just me, no way with two kids). So, I spent from December to June looking for work. I went from where I retired, Fort Benning, GA, home to Alabama and started looking. I went to Atlanta, Birmingham, down to Florida in Tallahassee and Gainesville looking. Nothing worth what I needed. I had two aunts that lived in Washington state, and I was close to one of them over the years, always staying in touch. She had my uncle send me the Sunday paper to look for jobs. I finally saw that there were jobs in law offices out there by the ton. So, I talked it over with my girls and since they had been moving all their lives, one more move was fine. So we moved to WA and I got a job within FOUR days of being there!! I went on a Thursday to interview and was hired and started the next Monday. The lawyer I was working for at a good sized firm had a brother who was career Navy. So he hired me because of his brother being military. That was fine by me. We hit it off great. I lived out there for 14 years. Met my current wife out there. We moved back to Alabama in late 2006. My girls were grown and gone. Both have finally come back to Alabama also. We are happy back here in Bama. My wife loves it down here. She is from Wisconsin but lived the big majority of her life in WA. She loves the south. Seattle had just become a totally different city than when she grew up there in the 1950s and 1960s. But, I moved over 3,000 miles for a job and did well out there. I changed jobs twice more after that first job. Ended up with a very large firm and working for an attorney from Buffalo, NY who came to WA state. Female. Give you one guess why she came to WA state. Yeah, her girlfriend worked for the US Attorney’s office in Seattle. They went to China and BOUGHT a child and brought the child back here to the USA.