By Editor,Frank Gibson

Copyright dailymail

The timing felt cynical; the tone of casual friendliness a little too contrived. A ‘quick catch-up’ was what my line manager proposed. He wanted to meet me for 15 minutes at the end of the working day, just before I was due to go on holiday. Unsettled, I made a note in my calendar.

Why did he need to see me face to face? I was working from home that day – why was it so imperative for me to go into the office for the meeting, just as I was winding down for a week away with the children? Usually we corresponded digitally. Couldn’t his query be dispatched with an email?

My heart started to race: a sign of anxiety. I tend to catastrophise. All the tiny clues that something might have been amiss started to add up. Hadn’t he been weirdly distant in the past few weeks? Was there a waning interest in the ‘exciting new project’ I had been headhunted for less than six months earlier?

I tried to calm my racing thoughts and blot out their inevitable conclusion.

But my instincts were right. The exchange was terse. There were perfunctory regrets and an offer of support from the company’s mental health service, then, minutes after I left the room, my laptop stopped working.

All access to company information, to projects, policies and procedures, had ended.

I no longer had my £100,000-a-year post in the tech industry. At 48 I was jobless. Redundant. One of 22,000 casualties of tech industry layoffs in the UK this year alone.

And for the first time in my life I now had no option but to sign on for what I grew up calling ‘the dole’, but is now known as Universal Credit.

Professional, skilled, nearly 50 – and yet once a week I’m at the Jobcentre where the only vacancies on offer seem to pay no more than the minimum wage.

Redundancies as a whole are steadily rising. In the year to July 142,000 people lost their jobs according to latest figures from the Office for National Statistics – with the impact falling heavily on middle-aged and older workers. Every day of the week experts in their 40s and 50s, who’ve built up decades of expertise in their fields find themselves newly unemployed. Workforces are contracting due to a mix of economic uncertainty, AI, cost-cutting and shifts in global trade policy.

The great hollowing out of the middle-class job market is well under way – and this summer I became a part of it. At first I felt a mix of panic and emptiness, that sick surge of adrenaline I’d only experienced once before, when my marriage ended ten years ago. There were tears.

Then I felt bereft; an acute sense of loss, which later morphed into disbelief and incredulity. That in turn gave way to anger and a palpable desire to lash out at my now ex-company.

They had lured me away from my previous equally lucrative job with the promise I’d be making a real impact on a new project.

Suddenly there was a pivot, a change of plan, and the company wanted to get rid of me before I’d accrued any employment rights. It all felt intensely unfair, as though I’d been set up.

And in the midst of this tearful regret, I somehow had to find another job. I told myself I needed to be positive, focused, determined. Yet as the weeks went by I found it increasingly hard to tamp down my anxiety, to stop the fear bubbling up.

I knew I would not progress seamlessly into a new position but I had no idea how incredibly hard it would be to find one at all.

Today, more than three months after I lost my job in late June, I’ve applied for 100 posts without success – and believe me, it’s a protracted and soul-deadening process, and one which the Jobcentre has been of no use whatsoever.

In my old life I was an effective people manager, helping software engineers build the latest apps for iPhones. Suddenly I lost my moorings, my professional identity and – what quickly became the most pressing problem of all – my generous salary.

Amicably divorced with four children – aged 24, 23, 19 and 13 – I’ve been single for the past decade. As they grew up, I shared custody of all the kids equally with my ex-wife, although now only the youngest lives with me on alternate weeks.

When I lost my job, I’d just handed over a chunk of money to my 19-year-old for his first year at university, making me even more financially vulnerable. I wondered if I should cancel our holiday to Croatia, then reasoned it had all been paid for. Besides, I didn’t want to disappoint my children.

But now I sat down to do some very scary calculations. I had outgoings of £5,000 per month, including credit card debts, payments on my car and a mortgage of precisely £2,208. It didn’t take long to work out I’d swiftly burn through my relatively small buffer of £17,000 savings.

It was a sobering thought: I was just months from poverty. And I’ve been more circumspect than most: I’m shocked to discover that 38.6 per cent of 45 to 54-year-olds have less than £1,000 in savings for a rainy day.

I also knew I needed to find a job that paid more than £80,000 a year pre-tax just to cover my fixed living costs.

I worry less for myself than for my family. I’m most concerned for my 13-year-old: he can walk to school from my house and is settled. I don’t want to disrupt him by moving to a cheaper house in a more distant suburb, which would be less accessible to school, uproot him from friends and move him further from his mum.

You may think all this sounds a bit close to self-pity, that £100,000 is an absurdly high salary and that the vast majority live on far less. But believe me, I’ve not been profligate.

When my wife and I divorced we sold the family home and, because I earned substantially more than she did – she works in admin for the local council – we used the collateral so she could buy a smaller home without a mortgage.

I rented for a couple of years to save up a deposit for my current three-bedroom home in the suburbs of a large city, which I bought – it was quite a stretch even then – with a 90 per cent mortgage. My overall debts are just north of £500,000.

In those days when I was earning a six-figure salary, I had a rather anomalous attitude to budgeting. I used to take a disproportionate amount of time shopping around for the best price on a decent bottle of wine but thought nothing of spending £500 on a jacket on a whim.

Now I’m selling anything of value I own on Vinted and alcohol is an unnecessary extravagance.

Today, I’ve spent all my savings and, frankly, I’m on the edge of destitution. I exist in a state of permanent low-level panic. I still buy groceries – but from Lidl or Aldi instead of Waitrose – when my son is staying.

But on the weeks when I’m on my own I subsist on leftovers or half-price vegetables – mushrooms, broccoli, celery – which I bulk buy at the end of the day, make into soup and eat with the cheapest bread.

I’m thankful for small mercies, for my ex-wife’s understanding; for the fact that my youngest son is a little way off from begging for the latest designer trainers.

I’m grateful for the mild autumn as I haven’t had to put the heating on, but I’m dreading the onset of winter and yet another hike in the cost of fuel.

I don’t know what I expected when I went to the local Jobcentre Plus to sign on. But it was utterly dispiriting. My first trip there lasted precisely 13 minutes and 46 seconds, and that included 10 minutes waiting for my allotted slot. Subsequent visits have got progressively shorter.

When I arrive, I stand in a snaking queue where a greeter asks my name, checks it against his list on a clipboard then hands me over to a security guard.

I imagine it’s like visiting someone in prison: utilitarian furniture, banks of chairs on either side of desks; harsh lighting. I feel ashamed, chastened; slightly bewildered as I shuffle along behind career job-seekers who know the ropes. Stephanie, my Jobcentre work coach, is in her early 20s. She has excessively long, pointed fingernails that make it difficult for her to type, enormous fake eyelashes and a swathe of bleached highlights on top of her otherwise dark hair.

She talks in monosyllables – much like the son I’ve just sent off to university – and seems uninterested in her job.

Nevertheless, it’s Stephanie who has so far supported me in my application for universal credit – she’ll also be the one who assesses my continued eligibility for it. I’m in line for £400.14 per month and, once in receipt of it, I’ll be able to apply for council tax relief and a host of other benefits.

Without meeting my gaze once, Stephanie told me on that first visit that I’d have to spend the equivalent hours of a full-time job actively seeking work.

I must also keep a diary of all the jobs I apply for.

She questioned me about accepting a job on the minimum wage – as a carer maybe – and I told her a carer’s entire year’s salary would not even pay my mortgage. ‘That’s a lot,’ she remarked when I told her what my monthly outgoings are.

On week two, my Jobcentre visit to Stephanie lasted three minutes and 10 seconds.

I confirmed I’d applied for 11 jobs. She suggested we Google to see if we could find other opportunities but seemed aghast that only junior roles were listed.

‘How do you find the senior jobs?’ she asked. I introduced her to LinkedIn. Something tells me I’m not the usual clientele.

Later the same week I received an urgent message from the Department of Work and Pensions: a care home is recruiting new staff. No experience necessary. Training provided – £12.89 per hour. Sigh.

Today I continue to apply for the latest tranche of ridiculously over-subscribed tech jobs. You’re lucky if your CV is even seen and I’d hoped – vainly of course – that the Jobcentre might refer me to someone who could give me tips on refreshing it.

In fact I’m astonished at how ill-equipped they are to offer genuine and practical help to applicants for skilled jobs.

In the tech industry, interviews are multistage, with around five down to the final stage. It is a time-consuming and emotionally draining process.

I work diligently at my applications in my home office and try to prepare myself mentally for rejections. It is isolating and on bad days I think there is no point in persisting in the path I’m taking. I wonder if I’m even capable of doing my job anymore. I toy with becoming a Deliveroo driver.

The falsely raised hopes are hardest to bear. I reached my lowest ebb last month when I got through an entire interview process and was told I was in line for a job offer. I allowed myself a moment of jubilation – but then the recruiter went on holiday and a replacement took over.

‘Actually, we’re not taking anyone on now,’ he told me casually, without realising the extent of the existential gloom that would then descend.

For a few days after that I felt myself sliding towards depression. I’d turned down other interview requests because I put so much faith in getting that job. I wondered if I should go to the doctor for a prescription of antidepressants which I’ve had before – but instead I picked myself up, brushed myself down and put all my energy into completing another batch of applications.

During my divorce I was treated for clinical depression with medication and therapy. Now I recognise the warning signs and I’ve developed coping mechanisms. The moment I feel the black cloud descending, I know how to lift it.

I get up early – I’m always awake by 5am – and go for a bike ride or a run. It raises my mood and costs nothing. But my days are full of highs and lows, so I try to take comfort from small triumphs.

I remind myself that a call from a hiring manager is good news, even if it leads nowhere.

On the whole, I’m pleased with my resilience even though it’s bleak when you’re counting every penny. Hardest to bear are not actually the incessant, niggling economies, but the periods of total silence – when I’ve been applying myself assiduously to my job search and literally nothing comes back.

On those bad days I sometimes think I need to take an entirely different approach, to lower my goals, but I’ll meet a friend for a cup of tea, chat to them and once they’ve given me a pep talk I’ll feel better.

Meanwhile every little extra has been pared away. I’ve cancelled my Netflix subscription and gym membership. I turn down invitations to the pub and theatre.

My next sacrifice will be my ruinously expensive BMW SUV which I’ve only managed to cling on to by switching my mortgage payments to interest-only. I don’t really need a car, except to ferry my son around, so that will go next month.

I used to enjoy taking the kids out to high street restaurants and occasionally pubs for lunch. All that has stopped, of course, and although I try to shield them from my money worries, my eldest is starting to make all sorts of kind offers to help me out financially.

I would never accept it, though – any more than I would burden my elderly parents, who are well into their modest retirements, with my troubles.

Three months on I’m still jobless, still searching, still deploying all my financial acumen to cut my spending.

But I’ve also got three interviews next week. So that’s cause for celebration – isn’t it?