Observation, not forecast
Thirty years of moved goalposts.
This is a description of what happened, several times, to people James was interviewing at the time. It is not research, not a model, and not a prediction. It describes the past because the past is the only thing anyone can describe honestly.
Read this the right way
What follows is one man's vantage point on one industry. It is not a law of economics and it does not tell you what will happen to you. Where it is useful, it is useful as a mirror: you may recognise a shape you are currently standing inside, and recognising it early is most of the advantage.
Nothing here predicts. No figures, dates or proportions of jobs are offered, because none can be honestly given.
It never arrives as one event
Every time, in hindsight, there was a date people later pointed at. And every time, from the inside, there was no date at all — there was a series of small adjustments that each looked survivable. A route quietly dropped. A team not replaced when it left. A process that used to need a conversation and now needed a form.
James noticed that the men who saw it early almost never described a fact. They described a feeling, usually something like the work having gone quiet in a way they could not explain. The ones who ignored that feeling were generally the ones waiting for an announcement, and the announcement is always the last thing to arrive.
The confident forecasters were wrong. Every time.
In thirty years James has heard a great many people explain exactly what the industry would look like in five years. He cannot recall one who was right. He can, however, recall a clear difference between two groups: the men who tried to predict, and the men who prepared without predicting.
The second group did better. Not because they were cleverer, but because prediction is a bet and preparation is not. A man who has been quietly curious about something adjacent for two years has options whichever way it goes. A man who called it correctly has one option, and only if he called it correctly.
What the ones who came through well had in common
Rarely the most talented. James is direct about this, because it is the finding that surprised him most and it has held up for three decades. The men who came through a shake-up well were the ones who had already been curious about the next thing before they needed it to be a plan.
Not retraining. Not a qualification. Curiosity with no business case attached — the thing they had been reading about anyway, the part of the operation they had always found interesting, the adjacent role they had asked someone about over a drink. When the ground moved, they were not starting; they were continuing.
The skill was never the hard part
Men consistently underestimated this. Asked what worried them, they talked about skills — whether they could learn the new system, whether they were too old for it. Almost always they could, and almost always they were not.
What actually caught them was identity. Twenty years of being the person who knew how something worked, and then that knowledge being worth less than it was. James's observation is that this is the part that takes the time, and it takes it whether you acknowledge it or not. The men who named it early spent less time in it.
Loyalty to an employer is not loyalty to a craft
These get confused at precisely the wrong moment. A man who has been somewhere fifteen years often cannot tell whether he is attached to the work or to the building, and a restructure forces the question at the point of maximum pressure.
It is a much easier question asked early, over a quiet week, with nothing at stake. That is the closest thing on this site to advice, and it is still only an observation: it costs nothing to ask yourself now, and it costs a great deal to ask yourself in a redundancy consultation.
Why an industry on thin margins teaches this better
Travel is enormous — US$11.6 trillion and 366 million jobs in 2025, per WTTC research — and it is paid badly relative to its scale. Airlines make roughly $7.90 per passenger at a 3.9% net margin, per IATA.
An industry that thin has no cushion, so it adjusts fast and often. That is unpleasant to live through and it is an unusually good place to learn from, because a man working in travel has typically already survived two or three complete changes of the rules. He may not have noticed that he did.