5,000 people just woke up in a different world

This week Barclays announced it is cutting around 5,000 jobs. About 60% of them are in support functions — including developers, because AI is making people more productive and fewer of them are needed. On the same day, the bank reported a 12% rise in quarterly profit, to £2.3bn.

This isn't a crisis. It's a change of systems and rules within these systems.

The people affected aren't random. They are educated specialists with years of experience, good salaries and, most likely, decent severance packages. For many, the financial hit is survivable. The psychological one is not!

Because their whole lives followed a clear script. School, university, degree, internship, job. Do good work and you're needed. Build a career, take a course every five years, collect your promotions.

And then you wake up in a world where the rules have changed. Worse, they are changing right now, and nobody knows in which direction.

• Stability is gone: even record profits don't protect your role.

• A degree is no longer proof of knowledge, or a ticket into a good company and a good position.

• Loyalty is no longer rewarded: 17 years at one bank is not an advantage any more — sometimes it's a question at interview.

• Experience no longer guarantees value: what matters is how fast you learn.

• Skills no longer last for decades: their shelf life is shrinking to a few years.

• Promotions no longer come with tenure: they go to people who change faster than their role does.

• Your CV is no longer read by a person first: an algorithm screens it.

• A technical career is no longer a safe harbour: the people who wrote the code are being cut too.

Take Mark's case

He's 46. Seventeen years at the bank. He knows the settlement processes by heart. He learned he was being made redundant on a 15-minute video call.

The first morning after. The alarm goes off at 6:40, as it has for 17 years. Out of habit he reaches for his phone to check work email — and only then remembers. There is no work email. Access was switched off yesterday.

He lies there, staring at the ceiling. The silence in the house feels strangely loud. His wife leaves for work and asks if he's OK. "I'm taking a pause to think," he says.

He makes coffee and opens his laptop. Job sites. The first ad: "experience with AI". The second: "experience implementing AI solutions". The third — the same. He closes the laptop. Opens it again an hour later. Closes it.

By evening he has done nothing, yet he's as tired as if he'd worked a double shift. He has woken up in a new world, but he has no map of it. And the scariest part — it seems nobody does.

Three weeks pass like this.

Why I understand Mark's case so well

In 20 years I have seen and heard dozens of stories like his. Hundreds of moments when a person falls into the abyss without realising they are still standing on the shore. When Mark says "I'm taking a pause", I hear "I'm scared, and I don't know where to start."

My approach rests on three pillars:

The first is hearing the person behind the words. A CV tells you what someone has done. I need to understand who they are, what really holds them back and what frightens them. Without that, any strategy is just a nice document nobody follows.

The second is an investigative view of the market. I constantly study how professions, companies and the rules of hiring are changing, and I ask questions that aren't in the standard playbook. So I don't only offer the obvious paths. Sometimes the most unexpected idea turns out to be the one that works.

The third is experience with people in crisis. I work with people made redundant after many years at one co

mpany. People who moved to another country and are starting their careers again. People who burned out at the peak of their success, or are returning to the market after a long break. Every crisis is different, but I know how it feels from the inside and what helps people get out. So I can help someone first stand steady, and then take their first firm step.

The world Mark woke up in doesn't follow protocols. So you can't work with it by protocol either.

Right now Mark is in denial. The stages of acceptance don't always come in order, but you have to go through all of them. And yes, anger is needed here: it's energy. What matters is directing it not into chaotic applications that bring rejections and erode self-belief, but into a deliberate plan.

In our first session I won't give Mark a single market statistic. He needs to talk. And there will be just one task: write down what he's afraid of right now. A fear on paper stops being fatal.

What Mark can't see yet: he remembers work when the main tool was people, not interfaces. His network is capital. And his inside knowledge of processes is exactly where every AI implementation begins.

The world of AI holds huge opportunities for experience like his. But everyone will have to build their own path there. Not necessarily alone.

In my next posts I'll look at more stories: Anna, a developer who rolled out AI in her own team, and David, a VP who drew up redundancy lists — and then landed in the last wave himself.

Have you, or someone close to you, woken up in this new world? What did the first morning feel like?