Laid off? Odds are a change of job title's in your future

Odds are that if a person gets laid off, they’re going to switch to an entirely new job.

A study from career transition company LHH found that 57.7% of the laid off people the firm surveyed said that they swapped job titles in 2025. That figure has stayed roughly the same for the past three years.

However, the top reasons people have lost their jobs — and the reasons they’re switching — are new.

Once upon a time (as in, the mid-20th century) the job market was more centered around manufacturing and construction. So, it was more cyclical, according to Guy Berger, director of economic research at The Burning Glass Institute.

“And so, you have these layoffs, and then, eventually, the inventories roll down, and you start producing stuff again,” Berger said. “People get recalled back to work.”

He said that by the 1990s, that cyclical job market was pretty much gone. Now, it’s different.

“You have these permanent layoffs where you lose a job, and the job's gone,” Berger said.

So more often, unemployed people have to find something different. Today, the careers they are most likely to leave include customer service, logistics, and office support.

“It's largely due to the digital transformation that companies are going through, and a lot of the AI disruption,” said John Morgan, president of LHH, which released the report.

Morgan said that not all of the disruption is because of AI. Customers have been walking into Panera and ordering sandwiches on tablets for a while now.

“We've had chatbots on websites for a long time,” Morgan said. “We've had a lot of workflows being automated by robots for a long time.”

Many of the roles that workers abandon are what Michele Evermore, senior fellow at the National Employment Law Project, calls foot-in-the-door jobs.

“Where you actually may be seeing people transferring to something more consequential,” she said.

Evermore said that leaving an office assistant job isn’t bad news when it means getting promoted to, say, project manager.