It is one of the most stressful things that can happen: getting laid off from your job. If you’ve experienced it, you know the panic it can cause – worries about income, career, and, in some countries, healthcare.
But what if being laid off turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to you? And not thanks to good luck, but because there was a system in place designed specifically to unlock your potential and get you into a better job than before?
This is the promise of Sweden’s unique ‘transition system’, a nationwide private welfare service for workers who have become recently unemployed due to redundancy. Companies pay into "job security council's", which provide skilled coaches who pick you up, dust you down and match your skills and ambitions with the market. There are 16 of these organisations, each covering a different sector of the economy and tasked with finding new jobs for workers who have lost their jobs for economic reasons.
As a result, Sweden has the best re-employment rates in the developed world – about 90% of laid-off workers are back in work within a year. This is drastically higher than France and Portugal, the OECD points out, which only place about 30 % of the workers within the year