I am joining Thomson Reuters in Canada. Salary is very good for Canadian standards. All the layoff posts are scary and have me worried. Any advice on how to avoid layoffs? Does high salary automatically puts you into layoff bucket?
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I had a six-figure salary and was gone in a year. Just depends where you're positioned on the management decision dartboard.
1gbr: you are correct about middle managers. They have been alienated while being some of the people with the most institutional knowledge. It doesn't make sense.
Take this with a pile of salt, but maybe it'll help.
Look, layoffs and re-orgs are an annual thing at TR, as the brass keeps changing its mind about where it wants to go. Right now the company is led by software fetishists who want TR to be a technology startup (content and expertise be damned). As I understand it, Bremner (and Waterloo) are where they have the teams they find most interesting and Bremner is probably what the previous poster was thinking of re the company making a significant investment in Toronto. So you're probably safest there, assuming you're on some tech dev team. But who knows. They could outsource your whole department to Eastern Europe next year. I'm told that's what happened to the devs who did software for internal systems.
My view is that the -teams- most at risk right now are the ones that don't fit into the new structure. In Toronto that's mostly legacy stuff from Carswell. To my knowledge, there's never been Carswell stuff at Bremner.
The -positions- most at risk are middle management, as the company leadership has declared war on org chart layers. To the extent that managers used to be promoted from below, that means we've lost a lot of institutional memory in the past year, as well as a lot of high salaries.
It’s at Bremner.
Depends a bit on what you mean by Toronto. There's a lot of legacy stuff (from prior acquisitions) floating around, which they keep either laying off (manufacturing) or selling off (Cyberbahn, media).
Without going into detail about your role, what location will you be working at?
Kennedy? Bartley? Bay? Bremner?
I'd wager the further south the safer you are.
Unless you're at Bartley. That's the plant, and it's closing in August.
@abp - how long is that "for a while"? And what do you mean being asked to work on things they have never worked before? Is this whole "agile", "scrum", "user journey" thing? I don't see them making any changes to products they are selling or bringing any new products.
If you are based in Toronto you’re probably fine for a while. The company has made a significant investment there. Elsewhere is uncertain. Just know that the new TR is nothing like the old one. Senior leadership has changed everything. The TR of just a few years ago was slow, bloated and unprofitable for the amount of money being put back into the company and the Thomson family is tired of it. Leadership has been on a mission to change that through outsourcing, layoffs and consolidation to fewer locations. What hasn’t been proven yet is if this new model will work long term. You will be working with a lot of offshore teams who are not TR employees and many existing TR employees who are being asked to work on things they never have before. Domain knowledge is thin. The new way of doing things is still being figured out. Just go in with everyone eyes open knowing that the transformation of the company is in the let’s see if this will work phase.
My advice is to look elsewhere and save yourself some grief.
Nope