How to get back to Work - Irish Examiner 14.5.10

Six people, six redundancies, six dreams of a new life — and just six months to turn it around. That’s the challenge facing career coach, John Fitzgerald, in a new television series, Rising After Redundancy.

The six-part, RTÉ Cork series tackles a group of recession casualties; three men and three women, from a variety of backgrounds and ages, who have been made redundant in the last 18 months: a former SR Technics worker, a self-employed businessman, a Polish national, a mother with young children, a former sales and marketing manager, and a divorced 59-year-old woman.

The point, says producer, Marie Toft, is to give hope to the 430,000 unemployed and encourage them to take control of their lives: “I thought that if we could find an agent of change, someone who could look at things in a different way, and get people perceiving their lives and their redundancy in a new way and finding new careers, it would make for a very good series. It was a question of finding the right person.”

That person was John Fitzgerald, a career coach for the past decade, who has worked with corporate clients such as O2, Musgrave, Superquinn, Danone, Tyco and Carphone Warehouse. Fitzgerald — who had experienced unemployment and four different careers by age 40 — doesn’t believe in the ‘quick-fix’ solutions to job-loss.

The solution, he says, is a comprehensive, meticulously researched six-stage overhaul of a person’s situation, skills, abilities and goals. His job was never to find employment for the programme participants — which was a shock to those involved: “The people I dealt with in the programme found this very challenging, primarily because it wasn’t a quick fix. I explained that this was about teaching them to get what they wanted, not about me finding them a job.

“What I do is teach a person how to fish — I don’t do the fishing for them. And the fishing lessons take place over several stages,” he says. The result is an observational documentary in which nothing is contrived, says Toft: “We don’t try to create happy endings. Not everyone gets the outcome they wanted, but it is a very individual journey for each participant, and they all have lots of highs and lows.

“Ultimately, John’s message is inspiring, particularly for anyone who has been made redundant. We’re hoping it will inspire people to take control over what they want to do. This series isn’t just about the unemployed; it’s for everyone who is in a job they don’t like and feel they’re capable of much more.”

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