In 2020, British employers made plans to cut 800K jobs, a record number. Covid lockdowns were largely responsible for the downturn in business as 10,000 firms planned job cuts. However without the government's furlough scheme designed to protect jobs, the numbers might have been higher.

In recent months the pace of layoffs has slowed down with new Covid variant case numbers and new lockdowns imposed across UK - but what is next? With furlough deemed to end in the coming couple of months, the aftermath of it all will ring true for longer than we have endured this pandemic.

Tony Wilson, Director of the Institute for Employment Studies believes the decision to extend the furlough scheme, where government pays most of a worker's wages if their employer can't, will have enabled more firms to keep their staff, "The question now though is where redundancy figures go next,".

"If they start to stabilise around these levels, then job cuts would be at least one third higher than what we've seen over most of the last decade, and it's possible that a combination of this lockdown and then furlough unwinding from May could see numbers creeping up." Despite it all, Mr Wilson sees the situation as pretty positive.

While the actuality of the increased numbers may be much higher, as there is a lag in number reporting from employer to insolvency service to the office of national statistics—for example, Insolvency Service figures showed record levels in redundancies in June and July, which was confirmed when the ONS published its own figures three months later. The latest figures, for the period from August to October, saw a new record of 370,000 redundancies across the UK.—the total number of job cuts planned will be higher than the Insolvency Service totals as individual firms often make fewer cuts than the number they first propose to the government.

Now is not the time to sit back and panic, or worse, ignore the issue. Now is the time to begin planning.

From taking out the dusty old CV and updating it, to reflecting on past career mishaps and triumphs to carve the way for your future career path—the career advisors at blowleaf are here to help you blow new life into your career and to help prepare you for the turmoils that lay ahead in 2021.