I agree she will almost certainly be able to find employment, but will she find employment better than or comparable to a 35 year public service career? That offers a completely different set of benefits and perks from that level of seniority. Maybe she’ll find a new job that gets paid the same, or quite plausibly even more, but the other benefits are not directly transferable. People go into the public sector precisely because it’s a stable and heavily structured employment environment with a pretty clearly defined career path. And her path is now gone, she has effectively been dumped in the middle of an unfamiliar field and left to figure out where to go from here.
The private sector is culturally very different from the public sector, and frankly someone who’s spent 35 years as a public service lifer probably doesn’t have the kind of dynamic attitude and mercenary moral flexibility to be able to slide smoothly into a private sector leadership role. Maybe they do, but it’s not guaranteed, and maybe not even likely. They also might not have the same network of professional connections in the industry. I’m not saying they can’t make the transition and make it successfully, and they certainly have the hard skills to do it, but the soft skills maybe not and it’s likely to be a rough landing even if they do quickly pick up the necessary skills. As people get older they aren’t necessarily as mentally flexible to be able to make a high level and drastic change like that. And that’s not even counting the severe toll on mental health from an unexpected job loss, which is well-studied academically but minimized by business interests and poorly understood by laypeople. She may not even have the mental resilience to go directly back into the same level of job, despite having all the skills and opportunities to do so, she (and all the others who’ve lost their jobs) may still end up unemployed, underemployed, in depression or worse.
I agree she will almost certainly be able to find employment, but will she find employment better than or comparable to a 35 year public service career? That offers a completely different set of benefits and perks from that level of seniority. Maybe she’ll find a new job that gets paid the same, or quite plausibly even more, but the other benefits are not directly transferable. People go into the public sector precisely because it’s a stable and heavily structured employment environment with a pretty clearly defined career path. And her path is now gone, she has effectively been dumped in the middle of an unfamiliar field and left to figure out where to go from here.
The private sector is culturally very different from the public sector, and frankly someone who’s spent 35 years as a public service lifer probably doesn’t have the kind of dynamic attitude and mercenary moral flexibility to be able to slide smoothly into a private sector leadership role. Maybe they do, but it’s not guaranteed, and maybe not even likely. They also might not have the same network of professional connections in the industry. I’m not saying they can’t make the transition and make it successfully, and they certainly have the hard skills to do it, but the soft skills maybe not and it’s likely to be a rough landing even if they do quickly pick up the necessary skills. As people get older they aren’t necessarily as mentally flexible to be able to make a high level and drastic change like that. And that’s not even counting the severe toll on mental health from an unexpected job loss, which is well-studied academically but minimized by business interests and poorly understood by laypeople. She may not even have the mental resilience to go directly back into the same level of job, despite having all the skills and opportunities to do so, she (and all the others who’ve lost their jobs) may still end up unemployed, underemployed, in depression or worse.