What to do before a layoff: the 30-day preparation checklist.

The hardest thing about preparing for a layoff is not the logistics. Most people know, in principle, what preparation looks like: update the resume, contact the network, review the finances. The hard thing is doing those things while still employed, with the psychological noise of uncertainty running in the background.

Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman's transactional model of stress and coping, published in 1984, provides the most useful frame for understanding why this is difficult.¹ The model distinguishes between two broad coping strategies: problem-focused coping, which targets the source of the stress directly, and emotion-focused coping, which targets the emotional experience of the stress. Problem-focused coping — the preparation this article describes — is consistently associated with better outcomes under controllable stressors. But it requires first recognizing that the stressor is, in fact, partially controllable.

The goal of this checklist is to make that recognition concrete. You are not at the mercy of a company's decision. You are at the mercy of a company's decision minus whatever you do in the time you still have.

"The appraisal of a situation as threatening is not a fixed property of the situation. It is a relationship between environmental demands and the person's resources for meeting them." — Lazarus & Folkman, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping (1984)

The checklist below is organized into four phases. They are sequenced by impact, not by ease. The financial phase comes first not because it is more important than career preparation but because financial runway is the single variable most directly under your control right now, and it determines how much time and leverage you have for everything else.

Financial runway — how many months you can cover your essential expenses without a paycheck — is the foundation of everything else in this checklist. It determines how selective you can be in your job search, how long you can hold out for a role that is right rather than merely available, and how much psychological stability you have during the transition. A person with three months of runway and a person with nine months of runway are not in the same position.

• Calculate your exact monthly essential expenses Rent or mortgage, utilities, food, debt minimums, insurance, subscriptions. Not "roughly" — to the dollar. This number is your floor. Without it, "runway" is a vague comfort, not a planning tool.
• Know your current liquid savings, to the dollar Divide by your monthly essential expenses. The result is your runway in months. If it is less than three, financial preparation is not optional — it is urgent. If it is more than six, you have negotiating leverage that most people do not.
• Eliminate every non-essential recurring expense this week Streaming services, gym memberships, subscriptions that auto-renew. Do this before you need to, because doing it under financial pressure is worse than doing it under financial caution. Each dollar preserved now extends your runway.
• Understand your severance rights Review your employment contract, your employee handbook, and your state or jurisdiction's laws on severance. Know what you are entitled to, what is discretionary, and what the negotiation landscape looks like. Many employees accept severance packages without knowing they are negotiable.
• Model your health insurance transition options In the United States, COBRA continuation coverage is typically available for 18 months after employment ends, but the cost is substantially higher than employer-sponsored coverage. Know the cost in advance. Also investigate Marketplace plans, a spouse's plan if applicable, and short-term coverage options. This decision needs to be made quickly after a layoff; having the information now removes the time pressure.

One of the least-discussed features of a layoff is how quickly access disappears. In many organizations, IT access is revoked on the same day as the termination conversation — sometimes within hours of it. Everything you need that lives behind a company login needs to be captured now, while you still have it.

• Export your professional contacts from your work email and CRM Names, email addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles. Save these to a personal device and a personal cloud account — not a company-issued drive. This is the single most time-sensitive item on this list: contact data is among the first things you lose access to.
• Update your resume with current metrics and accomplishments Do not write from memory. Pull your actual performance data: project outcomes, revenue influenced, teams managed, efficiency improvements. Quantified accomplishments are significantly more effective than general descriptions, and you have access to the data right now that you will not have later.
• Save personal copies of work samples and performance reviews Portfolio pieces, project outputs, positive performance reviews, commendations — anything that could support future reference conversations or demonstrate your work. Save only what you are permitted to retain under your employment agreement; do not copy proprietary data or trade secrets.
• Update your LinkedIn profile to current — including a profile photo Profiles with current job information, quantified accomplishments, and a clear headline appear significantly more frequently in recruiter searches. Profiles without photos receive fewer connection responses. Do this now, while you are still employed, when your negotiating position is strongest.

Career preparation is the phase most people delay the longest because it requires the most sustained effort and produces no immediate visible result. It is also the phase where the gap between early movers and late movers is largest. A professional network that you have maintained and a job search you began before being laid off are qualitatively different from a network you are rebuilding from scratch and a search you are conducting under financial pressure.

• Identify 20 people in your professional network to contact this month Former managers, colleagues from previous roles, people who have moved to companies you respect. Not to ask for a job — to restore a relationship that has gone quiet. The research on job-search effectiveness consistently shows that weak ties — people you know but do not talk to regularly — are the source of the most useful job leads.²
• Send five of those messages this week Short, specific, non-desperate. "I have been thinking about the work we did on [project] — would love to catch up for 20 minutes when you have bandwidth." The act of sending is more important than the quality of the message. Do not wait for a perfect message. Send a good-enough message now.
• Identify three to five target companies and roles Specificity is more useful than breadth at this stage. A clear target lets you write sharper cover letters, warm up the right contacts, and focus your energy. "I want a VP of Product role at a Series B or C fintech company in Austin or remote" is a planning tool. "I want something in tech" is not.
• Request a LinkedIn recommendation from at least one current colleague Recommendations requested while you are still employed, before the market knows you are looking, carry more credibility and are easier to ask for. Give your recommender a specific project or contribution to focus on, rather than asking for a general endorsement.
• Build a short professional narrative for your transition Not a scripted answer, but a clear sentence or two: what you have done, what you do well, what you are looking for next. This is what you will say in the first 90 seconds of any networking conversation or phone screen. Write it down. Say it out loud. The people who have thought about this before they need to say it perform measurably better in early-stage interviews.

Lazarus and Folkman's coping model identifies a second dimension beyond the problem-focused / emotion-focused distinction: the role of perceived resources in shaping how threatening a stressor feels.¹ A person who has a clear support system, a stable sense of identity outside of work, and a realistic appraisal of their own strengths experiences job insecurity differently — not without fear, but with fear that does not paralyze. The items in this phase do not feel like preparation. They are preparation.

• Tell one trusted person what you are experiencing Not everyone. Not publicly. One person — a partner, a close friend, a mentor — who can hold the information and be a thinking partner without catastrophizing. Job insecurity that is carried entirely alone is metabolically more expensive than job insecurity that is shared with a trusted person, and the research on social support in occupational stress contexts is consistent on this point.³
• Establish and protect one hour per week for non-work identity A sport, a creative practice, a community. Something that would survive a layoff intact and that gives you a sense of competence and engagement that is not conditional on your employment status. Research on organizational identification — the degree to which people derive their sense of self from their job — consistently finds that high identification raises the psychological cost of job loss substantially above the financial cost.⁴
• Clarify your personal values for the next role Not just the functional criteria — title, salary, location — but the qualitative criteria: what kind of manager do you work best with? What size of organization? What does good culture look, sound, and feel like to you? People who clarify this before a job search are less susceptible to accepting offers that are wrong for them under financial pressure.

On timing: why now is better than later

The most common reason people delay this checklist is that acting on it feels like accepting that a bad thing is going to happen. It is not. It is accepting that uncertainty exists — which it does, regardless of whether you act on it — and using that uncertainty as a reason to improve your position.

The research on job-search outcomes in organizational psychology is consistent: the time between recognizing warning signals and beginning active preparation is the single most consequential variable in how well-prepared workers are when a layoff occurs.⁵ Workers who began preparing upon recognizing signals — not after the layoff, not when they were certain, but when they saw the warning signs — found new employment more quickly and reported significantly better psychological outcomes during the transition.

This checklist exists to make "beginning" concrete. Not a plan to start a plan. Specific actions, in a specific order, in a 30-day window that already started.

What this article is not

This is an editorial resource informed by published research on occupational stress and coping. It is not financial advice, legal advice, or a substitute for professional career coaching. The specific legal and financial items (severance, COBRA, employment contracts) vary significantly by jurisdiction and employment type — consult a professional for guidance specific to your situation.

If you have not yet scored your warning signals, the Layoff Risk Check below gives you a risk level and four specific actions calibrated to where you actually stand.

For a detailed breakdown of what each warning signal means, read 12 signs you are about to be laid off — and why most people miss them. For the cognitive science behind why these signals are hard to interpret clearly, see How to read workplace warning signs: what behavioral science says about reading the room.