Furlough

I AM ON FURLOUGH.

A word many of us never knew but has since become a common word in our vocabularies.

What does it really mean? Well it's, when an employee is absent temporarily which allows employees to stay on the payroll, even though they are not working.

When COVID19 came and changed the world, the reality of lockdown was that many employees' jobs were at risk and many employers could not afford to keep people on their books without them working. Like a superhero, the Government quite quickly introduced the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme which stated that employees were furloughed they  could get paid 80% of their wages up to a monthly cap of £2,500. 

A recent Resolution Foundation survey revealed “a third of lower-paid employees had lost their jobs or been furloughed as a result of the pandemic, compared with less than one in 10 top earners.Its survey of 6,005 adults found 15% had been furloughed from their main job in early May, rising to 21% in the private sector.

 Around 3% of employees and 4% of self-employed people had lost their main job.Those who had jobs with variable hours or zero-hours contracts before the pandemic were the hardest hit: 31% of employees with variable hours and 28% on zero-hours contracts had either lost their main job or been furloughed, while 19% of those previously on temporary contracts had lost their main job.”

Although furlough provides a temporarily solution and gives employees some sense of financial and job security right now, however, the reality is that, if you have been furloughed it means that your employer doesn't have enough money to sustain their employees and ultimately the future is very uncertain.

At TMR Career Advisors, we are coaching employees who are currently on furlough on how to make the most of this time by upskilling themselves. And how best to make the most of the various free resources that are available on the worldwide web, especially with all this time, people have whilst they aren't working. We also encourage employees not to become complacent and have a false sense of security, employees have to look after number 1 (themselves). Which could be simply dusting offer their CV and ensuring that their LinkedIn is up-to-date and prepared for whatever will come after the end of the furlough scheme which has now been extended to October 2020.