Job Security and Employability

The worst part was never the snake

So before we get into any of it, I want to put you in a chair at University College London. Bear with me folks!

There are electrodes taped to the back of your hand, sensors on your fingertips reading your sweat, a camera watching the size of your pupils, and every so often someone takes a swab of your saliva.

In front of you is a simple game. Two rocks on a screen. You choose one, and you guess whether there is a snake underneath. Most of the time there is nothing. But when there is a snake, you get a real, small electric shock to your hand. Your only job is to learn which rock is the safer bet.

The catch is that the odds keep shifting under you. For a while one rock is a near-certain snake. Then, without warning, it drifts back to a coin-flip. Forty-five people played this, more than three hundred turns each, while the researchers watched their bodies give them away.

And here's the key insight. People were not at their most stressed when the snake was almost certain to be there. They were at their most stressed when it was fifty-fifty, when they simply could not know. An almost-certain shock yielded a calmer response than a maybe, so the dread lived in the not-knowing.

Right now, there's a lot not to know

Now swap the snake for redundancy and the rock for your job, and you have almost exactly what job insecurity feels like from the inside. The not-knowing is the stressor. Which is why job insecurity corrodes the way it does, and why, on the classic ranking of life's most stressful events, losing your job sits eighth of forty-three, up in the company of serious illness.

And that matters more than it first looks, because it changes what actually helps. The dread is not a rational calculation you can be reasoned out of. It is a threat, registered by the oldest, fastest parts of the brain, in the amygdala, below the level of logic. An alarm like that does not quiet when someone promises you'll be fine. It only really quiets when you feel you can do something about what is coming. Psychologists call that agency, or self-efficacy. Hold that thought, because it turns out to be the whole answer.

Now, barely a month or even a week goes by these days without a familiar household name announcing cuts or closing altogether, with redundancies running at a steady 3.6 per thousand employees (ONS). So it's hardly a surprise that a third of workers, 34%, fear their job could disappear within five years (Randstad), and a newer driver has joined the old ones: 39% of business leaders admit they have already made people redundant because of AI.

What I find really uncomfortable though is that, whilst we are asking everyone to work longer, the state pension age is climbing to 67, yet the older you are the harder a redundancy is to recover from: over-50s are twice as likely to fall into long-term unemployment once they lose their job. Staying employable is not a nice-to-have for a longer working life, it's what makes a longer working life survivable.

The law is catching up, a little. The Employment Rights Act became law last year, with more landing through 2027, and it puts a welcome 'floor' under people. But a floor stops you falling; it does not make you strong. Legislation can protect a job but it can't make someone the person three employers would compete to hire. So the reassurance people need now is not "you will be safe here," which no-one believes anymore anyway, but "you will be capable, wherever you go."

What people actually want now

When the ground feels unstable, people do not reach for ambition, they reach for solid footing. In new UK research from Ipsos Karian and Box, when you ask employees to choose, 60% pick job security and stability over faster career progression. The ladder matters less than the floor feeling firm.

And it isn't just one UK survey pointing this way. In Randstad's global employer brand research, when people are asked to rank what an ideal employer should offer, job security lands third overall, ahead of career progression.

But here's the part that really gave me pause for thought. The 'security' people intrinsically want to feel safe has changed shape. It's no longer "keep me in this job," it's "keep me employable." And they want it so badly that 63% would trade a 10% pay rise for the chance to upskill (Mercer). People are saying they would actually give up the prospect of more hard earned cash to stay relevant and increase their chances of staying out of the dole queue.

That is the whole shift, from job security to employability.

The old deal, what researchers call the psychological contract, ran on tenure: stay, be loyal, and you will be kept.

It runs on something else now. People are managing their own risk by building a range of skills rather than laying down roots in one organisation, and they are not waiting for us to organise it: the linear ladder is over, say Randstad, with 72% of employers agreeing, and over half of talent, 52%, already future-proofing their skills independently, outside any employer programme. 'Security' no longer comes from staying put… it comes from staying capable.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable bit. Because whilst people want this (badly enough to forego cash), the truth is that few employers are playing exceptionally well in this space. Only 15% say their manager helped them build a career plan in the last six months, down five points in a year (LinkedIn). Only 36% of organisations are what LinkedIn calls development champions, and a full third have no real career development at all, and only about one in four workers feel confident they have the skills for their next move (ADP).

So, what's ours to do?

Three things, then.

Marks & Spencer does exactly this. Its alumni network opens not with a pitch but with a feeling, "stay part of the M&S family forever", and the promise underneath is that you never really leave. Then it lets the proof speak, the people who started on a shop floor and went on to build careers, and companies, of their own, after their M&S chapter (like me!). That is not clinging to people. It is being proud of where they got to. And it is magnetic, because it says the quiet part out loud: we know you might go, and we think you will be better for having been here.

The tech world has its own word for it. Leave Google and you do not stop being a Googler, you become a Xoogler, a badge people keep for life. Leave PayPal in the early days and you joined what became known as the PayPal Mafia, the alumni who went on to build a good slice of Silicon Valley. P&G and McKinsey run some of the most storied alumni networks in business for the same reason. The identity outlives the employment. Your time there becomes part of who you are, and it travels with you.

Which is the whole point. That is portable security, the kind no one can make redundant. The employers who understand it do not hide their leavers, they celebrate them. Because a person who left you stronger, and knows it, is the most convincing employer brand any of us will ever have.

Where this leaves us

Put those three together and we're back in that chair at UCL, with the one move the game actually allowed. We can't take the shocks away. The market will keep turning over rocks, and no honest employer can promise the snake will never be there. But there was a second finding in the study that we should keep in mind. The people whose stress tracked the uncertainty most closely were also the ones who learned the game best. The discomfort wasn't just noise; when it was leaned into, it was the very thing that taught them to read the lay of the land and move with it.

That is employability, almost to the letter... Our version of that is demonstrating the real, resourced business of helping people grow, and then telling the truth about it, out loud.

And it may be one of the most valuable things our EVPs can do right now: be honest about what is genuinely solid about the ground people are standing on, and genuinely send them out stronger than they came in.

Vicki Saunders

Founding Director, The EVP Consultancy

With over 19 years in employer brand and EVP strategy, Vicki works with organisations to build employee value propositions that are honest, distinctive, and have impact. She's the creator of the 8-Dimensional EVP Framework and The EVP Edit newsletter.

vicki@theevpconsultancy.co.uk