Worried about layoffs? Make your value undeniable

If layoffs are in the air, the worst position to be in isn’t being less talented than your peers — it’s being less visible. Decisions get made fast, often by people one or two levels removed, looking at a spreadsheet. Here’s what the research says actually protects people, turned into things you can do.

Be expensive to lose — and make sure they know it

Replacing someone costs an employer roughly 0.5–2× salary, and about two-thirds of that is the institutional knowledge and relationships that walk out with them (Gallup; SHRM via Built In). Your job is to make that cost legible: be the documented owner of something that matters, the person a key client trusts, the one who knows why things are the way they are. If that knowledge lives only in your head and nobody senior knows it, it can’t protect you.

Document and surface your impact

Career guidance from Dice is direct: document your achievements, keep your skills current, and stay visible to the people who decide. This isn’t bragging — undocumented value is invisible value. Keep a running list of what you shipped, with numbers and dates, and make sure your manager has seen it before any decision is on the table, not after.

Show where you’re heading, not just where you’ve been

SHRM’s guidance on who stays weighs trajectory and strategic fit over raw past output — a growing contributor in an important area beats a bigger number in a shrinking one. Attach yourself to the priorities the business is actually betting on next, and make your role in them clear.

If the conversation comes, frame the loss

Should it come to making a case — for yourself or via your manager — the evidence says to frame what the organisation loses, not what it gains by keeping you. "Here’s the work that stops and the knowledge that leaves" lands harder than "I’m a good employee." See argue the loss, not the upside.

The honest caveat

In a pure role-elimination — where an entire function is cut — individual visibility can matter less; that’s structural, not personal. But for the far more common case of percentage reductions, where managers choose who stays, being the documented, hard-to-replace, forward-looking option is exactly what the research says helps. If you want to put it on paper, here’s how to make the case.