Executive Unemployment and Personal Redundancy: June 1975

This report deals with the experiences of a group of men and women who attended one of a series of seven courses at the University of Manchester in the period October 1972 to March 1975. It brings an earlier report published in Personnel Review of July 1975 up to date. The students included in this survey number eighty‐nine out of a possible 130 former students who were sampled. This report cannot be compared directly with the earlier report which stated the position up to November 1974, because both questionnaires were returned anonymously. It must be borne in mind that those returning an answer to our survey may not be typical of the total group of redundant executives as a whole. In this survey members of the two most recent courses replied in a ratio of 2:1 when compared with the course immediately before, and there is a possibility that older students and those who held higher grade employment were more likely to respond. It is also possible that those who are now in employment were more ready to reply. With this caution in mind, it is felt that the information contained in this report is of interest to those concerned with the problems of career change in middle life, particularly when the response rate for our sample was 68%. It is not yet possible to report on the state of the job market during the present recession with more general unemployment and this will be the subject of a subsequent report.