I have to say, I think all of you could have seen this coming. I worked for the company for a long enough time to figure out the ins and outs of the way the "politics" work in this place. Your direct leaders may have not seen this coming, but their direct leaders or the ones above them have known about this for months, possibly longer. Look around you. How many of your peers are being promoted out of nowhere? How many of them are being hand picked for new positions or a position that makes you raise your eyebrow and think to yourself "why him/her or me? Where is the qualification?". I experienced this first hand. After the breach and watching how much outsourcing was going on within the company and how much "insourcing" (where the company hires folks from other countries such as India and Russia to come work at their new home....TNC) and I decided to get out before I joined the unemployement lines looking for a similar job with everyone else in my department. I have worked for 3 other Fortune 500 companies besides Target and I can honestly say that they have so many rules, regulations, tests, meetings, metrics, and ass kissing interwined with it all that this was bound to happen. The Canada bit for instance....in my department their solution to providing actual IT support to the new Canada stores was to train them for a month and then let them lose. You may be thinking to yourself "Well I mean, it was an IT specialist that taught them, right?"...WRONG. Instead, some high paid "OE" (teacher) taught the class. No, this teacher has no prior experience in IT. No, this teach has not actually used any of the IT tools that they are teaching about. After the company noticed that they were about 2000 "technical problems" behind in Canada/HQ locations, but caught up for all other locations (manned by the USA) rather than retrain the individuals, they shrugged their shoulders in the USA and said "they are under a different umbrella"... and "All we can do is notify their lead, but what can we do on our end to ensure that does not happen here in our department"...and then proceed to have 10 projects over the next year to get nothing accomplished with it....but I digress.....I am sorry for all of you that have to go through this and stress about where your next job lies, but just breath. You will receive some sort of severance package (probably not much) and will be able to receive unemployment benefits. I know what you are thinking "I depend on that exact amount per month" and I hear you all loud and clear....When I quit I hated it so much that I bypassed all unemployment benefits (quit on my own terms) and just said "F" it. In order to provide for my family I did 2 things....opened an Ebay account and opened an Amazon account. I then found a few dropshippers on the internet that allowed me to sell their items. Dropshipping is where you are able to sell someone elses items on your website or ebay and when a customer pays you, you turn around and purchase it from your dropshippers website at a discounted rate and input the customer's shipping information. A ton of businesses will do this for you, you just have to put in a few hours of emailing a ton of them and wait a few hours to watch the responses flow through. A couple will say no but a lot will say yes. It's been 6 months since I quit Target and I now have 2 websites, an Ebay account and an Amazon account and work from home everyday. My wife also doesn't work. From selling random crap from sex toys to bug spray on Ebay and Amazon I now make upwords of 6K per month in profit. I'm not selling you anything. I dont have an ebook. But, I feel for you all. I know the vice grip Target has on you. You love your vacation, stock (some of you), pension (some of you), and health insurance. But I can tell you from personal experience that cutting the cord from that "S" hole will add years to your life based on the amount of stress that will be lifted off your shoulders.
Best of luck to all of you...for real.