From Laid Off to Employed (Survival Guide) with Robert Lukenbill

[00:00:23] In a land of testers, far and wide they journeyed. Seeking answers, seeking skills, seeking a better way. Through the hills they wandered, through treacherous terrain. But then they heard a tale, a podcast they had to obey. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.

[00:00:23] I've been busy the last two weeks planning and running our annual premium online automation testing conference Automation Guild. I wanted to share with you one of our top rated sessions from this year's event, Laid Off, Now What Do I Do? Where Robert shares his journey of going from laid off to newly employed and how to build an effective support system and network so that your unemployment period is as short as possible. And we also had an awesome live Q &A with them as well that I didn't include here, but if you missed it, you could still get an after event all access pass to get instant access to all the recordings of what happened for the whole 5 days. Make sure also to use the special code and link down below and check it out now.

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[00:02:37] Robert Lukenbill Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are in the world, where you're at in the year. I hope it's been a good year for your watches at the end of the year and I hope you had a good week so far with the Automation Guild, just as I have. I know we had a lot of exciting topics and this one is one maybe that's not as technical, although I do have some technical things to show you. And I have some things I hope that you'll enjoy and be able to glean from my experiences and be able to become a better, not only QA automation engineer, but also just a better person overall and feeling more secure in the job market as it is right now. And let me just preface by stating this entire thing of I can't really at liberty to tell you who I worked for when I was laid off. But if you have my LinkedIn account, you can pretty much figure it out for yourself because it happened within the last year and it's rather new to me. It's rather still a little bit of those things that you're still trying to absorb what happened. And so just to kind of get us started a little bit talking about laid off. Now, what do I do? There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people all over this world who are being fired, laid off, looking for new employment. Their employers maybe just disappeared because of the economy or natural fires, natural disasters, things like that. And now people are wondering, what do they do? What are they supposed to do? And so this is my story. And this is what we're going to talk about. The Legend of Bananas. And the reason I chose the Legend of Bananas, obviously, Legend of Zelda is one of my favorite games as a 90s gamer, 80s gamer, all the way back to retro NES when I bought my first one and played the Super Mario Brothers and loved it. And then, of course, I bought Legend of Zelda like most kids did my age and I started playing that. And just the adventure of it, the leveling up, the finding new weapons, having all of the things that we need to prepare to go to a boss fight or just to fight the mobs before we get to the boss. And so those are some of the things I want to talk about today. It's just the legend of this story that is completely bananas to me, even as I think about it today. And so we're going to talk about my story. We're going to talk about what I did in reflection of that story. Talk about where it took me and what it's taught me. And maybe just a little bit of parting advice for you. And so thinking about my story, the first thing I would say is I have been working 18 days in a row. I mean, including weekends, and we had been under extreme stress, just a lot of stress to get this particular project done by the end of September. I had no idea that that would be a deadline that would impact me personally and professionally at the end of September. But at that point, at the end of September, I've been working a lot of hours. We've been shortchanged to a lot of staff. They've been cutting staff over the last couple of years. And I thought it was because we were doing such great automation. And from September the 30th, I went on vacation and I was taking a week vacation. It had been planned. No problem. Boss was great with it. VP of operations said, yeah, it takes its time off. You've been working all hours. You deserve this. Appreciate everything you've been doing. Well, the next day, that evening, I'm sitting. It was Monday night. I'm sitting there. I'm watching the football game. And I get a text message. And it says, if you have received this text, you're receiving this text from Acme People team. And that's how it started. About an important business update. Acme Incorporated, of course, Acme as a fictitious company, is reorganizing. Unfortunately, your position has been impacted. Effective tomorrow, October 1, 2024. Now, the rest of the text had no personal information. No address to me as an individual. They made me a number to start with when they fired me. They sent a text message, no phone call, no emails, because they said that they, of course, had disabled all of our accounts. And I was just part of this reorganization. And more information would be given to us in a meeting that they dictated and a meeting that they set up for all of us who have been laid off. And I believe I don't have an exact number, but what I've been told is between 5 and 10 % of Acme's personnel, employees. And so, of course, it wasn't just me. It was many others. People who had worked with me. People that I've worked with for a couple, almost three years, and people that worked for me there as well. And in fact, the Vice President of Operations used to be one of my close friends, or at least I thought was my close friend at the time. And this particular situation, unfortunately, has severed that relationship. But that being said, the first thought I had in my head was, wow, if I was playing a video game, this boss, and I'm not talking about the company boss, but this boss in the video game just hit his ult. He just hit his ultimate, his power, his technique, the thing that he uses every single fight, and he hit that hard. And so now, I'm out of energy. I have been zapped. I have no energy. I have no thoughts. I am very, very concerned. Sitting there with my family, and I said, wow, I was just fired. I was just laid off. And I read them the text message, and it was just kind of stunning, at first. And then I'm thinking about this. I'm fired. I am the breadwinner of my family. My wife is a stay -at -home mother. My wife tends to the home. My wife takes care of her mother who has cancer and lives with us. So there's all these obligations that we have with our two children and all these things. And that was the first thing. How will I pay my mortgage? How will I support my family? Can I even look my family in the eye if I can't find another job? I mean, I would be, in my mind, this is just how society sometimes has built us up in my generation, growing up the way that we did. I'm almost, I am 50 years old. And so I'll share that with you. And that was just kind of the mindset is that, you're a man, you get out and work and you do these things and you support your family. And this is how it was in Midwestern America. Obviously, times have changed, and I think for the better in that regard. But that's the type of pressure you still have. Sometimes as a male in our society or just as an individual in any society, you're dealing with the pressures and the mounting of the fear of what do I do if I lose my job? How am I going to support my family? How am I going to deal with this situation? And so after all that, sitting there with my family and thinking about that and watching the football game and texting, the vice president of operation, my friend at the time saying, screenshotting it, what is this, is this a joke? It started to sink in. I am fired. And I asked him, I said, what are they going to do for us? Because I literally didn't have, I didn't have enough money to just sit on the couch and flip the remote and take the luxury to take time to find another job or whatever. In my mind, I was fired and my last paycheck was my last paycheck at that moment. I had no guarantee of severance, no guarantee of any type of company payout. Well, all will be revealed in the meeting tomorrow. I found out shortly before you did. I'm sitting there thinking about this and then I become furious. I'll be honest. It's a human reaction. You feel sad. You feel scared. And then you get, you just get angry and you're angry at everybody. You're angry at the company that lets you go. You're angry at your boss because they should have known better. You start hearing things in the woodwork of what happened, how this went down, how it was just a very toxic culture anyway. And then on top of that, you thought that you were secure in your employment because you were working for a cause that they made me believe that I was part of. And then I was cut loose along with a lot of other people. And so sitting there thinking about this, being angry, really brought to mind of something that's really important. And I read this years ago, Ralph Emerson Waldo, and I didn't think about this off the top of my head when I was doing this presentation, putting it together. But here is the quote. He says, for every minute that you remain angry, you give up 60 seconds of peace of mind. That applies what to anything relationships, personal things, whatever it may be. You're at the restaurant and somebody makes you angry because they brought you the wrong sandwich. Whatever it may be, anger takes away your peace of mind. In this particular situation, it was important for me to let that anger go as the breadwinner and sole earner of funds in my family. And that was my role, my chosen role. And that's OK. There's different roles for different types of family dynamics. And ours happens to have this dynamic. Well, I didn't have the luxury of just sitting there and waiting for somebody to call me for a job. So after the feeling of dread and fear and anger, then what are we going to do? Well, here's what I did. I've been hit by this boss, this boss power, right? The one that you dread, you know it's going to come, Bowser's there. He's got the fireballs. He starts with two, he goes with three, and then it's five. You got to be Mario. That's the hat shirt. And you got to be able to jump through those fireballs. You've been stunned when he hits you and knocks you back if it doesn't kill you. So what do you do in that situation? Well, here's what I did. Playing the game. Number one, as a good gamer, I need to buff. Right? If I'm playing a Dark Souls game, if anybody's a Dark Souls fan out there, I play Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Elden Ring, many other dark games. And I love those games. They're great. They're also one of the most angry games you can get. Like, it'll make you really angry because you're going to die a lot. And you learn how to use buffs. It buffs your power, buffs your health, it buffs whatever. In Dark Souls, you get a nice little flask and you can use it for health flask. And you can up some of your health if you've been hit very hard from a boss. And so when you aggro a boss, when you get hit with that stone cold stunner, that gut punch, whatever the case is that brings you to your knees in a game, and guess what in life too? You need a buff. You need a power up. You need a support team, right? If you're playing multiplayer, you got a support team. If not, maybe you're a Mario and you got a magic mushroom. If you're playing Dark Souls, you got a flask. You need something to help you through. You can't do it by yourself. And that's what I learned myself. So what about buffs? Let's talk about that for a moment. They're like a temporary boost, right? There's something that a materialistic that gives me just a little edge to get maybe win that boss fight or at least survive the boss fight. Well, we need to first talk about timing. Sometimes we just don't have all the time in the world. If you haven't been preparing for your eventual layoff and everybody will probably go through some sort of layoff, you will probably be fired at one point in your life. It will probably happen to where either if you're not laid off, then you've done very good at preparing. Or and you're in control of your salary. You're in control of your money. You're doing a good job investing and all the things that you need to be doing that we're going to talk about. Then you don't have to worry about this as much. But if you haven't done those things, ask yourself right now, what would I do if I got that text message right now or after this meeting? And I hope that you don't. But it may happen. You may get this message. You may have this happen to you at some point. And I don't want to bring your anxiety up. What I want you to do is think about it in a logical way and find a method that we can do to prepare for this and have these buffs, these power ups, the support team. That's the most important thing in this situation is to have this in place. So thinking about that, thinking about gaming, thinking about having that bar up. I'm sorry. Then we start talking about, OK, so I don't have a lot of time in the world. I just was fired. I had my last paycheck coming. I have a little bit saved in the bank maybe if I'm fortunate. What do I do in that situation? Well, I went to the meeting the next day and thankfully, they had offered us in exchange for signing my life away in some sort of contract. They basically said I wouldn't disclose any company secrets or sue them for any non -legal things, frivolous things that they would consider frivolous in a contract. And in exchange for that, I would have three months of salary. And how they were going to do it is they were going to give us just a lump sum check after we got our laptops turned back in, any equipment that we owed them because I was a remote worker. All that had to be turned back in. And so they would exchange for that. They would give us a lump sum. In the United States, if you get a lump sum paycheck, you also get lump sum taxes. Most of the people that I talked to, they lost a lot of their severance to the government. Now, you lose it. I mean, obviously, they're going to file that. It's going to probably be OK eventually, maybe, depending on their tax situation. With my situation, I did something a little bit more preemptive. I started reading up on what I could do to retain the most federal tax money instead of giving that to the federal government and then have them give them back to me. Could I use that now? So what I ended up doing was filing a form, my HR department. I immediately sent an email because we couldn't call them. They were not taking calls anymore from us. They said they gave us this email address and we could email them. I sent them an exemption form. They said that I was exempt from taxes. You need to look it up. You need to talk to your CPA. Please do not take my advice on doing it without doing that. But talk about it before you go through a layoff. These are things that you need to discuss. What would I do if I was paid out a lump sum of salary? How would I handle that lump sum? What would I do with the taxes to try to maximize the amount of money I have in my bank to pay my mortgage and my bare minimum bills? How do I lower the amount of debt that I have going out every month for the next three months or until I can find another job? Those are questions you should ask. And then also put together, if you can, three months of salary so you could live off of that if you don't get a severance. It will take you average if you're doing the things that you should be doing probably two months to three months. If you have some experience and you have a good resume and you're doing your job, finding a job, you should be able to find work within two to three months, depending on what your work is, the taxes. And then when you're in a buff situation, sometimes it's good to have a good warm feeling. If you have the time and you have the money and you've taken care of your taxes and you've done the things you need to do, then look at this also as a free vacation. I had already taken a vacation for a week. I did not finish my, we didn't plan on going anywhere. It was kind of a staycation for me to relax after a blitz at work. So I played a lot of video games that week and I did just whatever I wanted to do. My daughter's learning to drive, so we did extra driving time and spent a lot of extra time with my family and things like that. So that was nice. But I also, I did get to work finding a job right away. But I also spent, I spent three or four hours doing that every day and then went out and did things with family. So those are some things that you need to do to, you could do right now, thinking about it, preparing to have your buffs ready. And then there's the power up. Okay. I got this. This is, I've been fired. Now, where are these things? I'm going to get into some of the technical stuff real quick, you know, real soon. And the power ups.

[00:19:18] Robert Lukenbill LinkedIn. That's the first one I went to. I was already a member of LinkedIn. I already had a lot of good contacts, a lot of good people that I had met that were colleagues. A lot of you have added me on LinkedIn. Please add me if you want. I'd love to collaborate with you and even talk about this topic, offline. That's perfectly great. I'm more than happy to share whatever knowledge I have. But I had the basic package. I went to LinkedIn. I went into the browser and I just said LinkedIn premium. And I went to the premium page. And instead of paying full price, I went to the premium page. I went all the way to the checkout. And LinkedIn has an algorithm. If you don't have premium and you go to checkout and you look at the price, you click on everything, but checkout with your credit card information. It's fine. They're not going to steal your credit card information and then back out. Just leave it completely. Just leave the breath. Just leave it and then wait about a half a day and you'll get a premium offer. That's about I got 60 percent off for three months, which worked out perfectly for my situation. Now, I would also recommend LinkedIn premium as a regular member once you have a job as well. I do care. I do like it. It has more topics for me in QA than some of the other ones like Pluralsight is really good as well. And then, of course, you got YouTube videos. You have a plethora of resources. Oh, let me not forget the Automation Guild that we have about a gazillion videos, right? A great content. We definitely want to take advantage of those as well. So those are some of the things I would definitely put up there aside from Automation Guild because you're assumed already be a member. If you're here during this LinkedIn, LinkedIn premium, Dice was really good for me. Indeed, not so great, but not so bad. LHH services was something that the Acme incorporated had paid for us to have. That was part of our compensation package for being let go. I hated it. I'll be honest with you. It did nothing for me. I met with a coach. They were supposed to put my information up. They gave me some feedback on my resume. It didn't do anything for me. And I'm sorry, if you're part of LHH services, I'm sure you're great people. It didn't work for me. Some things are going to work for you that didn't work for me. Some things work for me that probably won't work for you. So that's why I wanted to make sure I gave you plenty of options here. So yeah, add me in on LinkedIn. Add everybody in the Guild if you want to. There's nothing wrong with collaborating and maybe send them a message first. I was part of the Guild and I wanted to add you in and talk about QA things. Don't add me just to sell me something because that's probably just going to irritate me. And I'd probably just get rid of you there. But if you're adding me legitimately, I'd love to collaborate with you. If you're another QA and work in technology or whatever the case is, I'd love to collaborate with you. And the great sponsors we have here, yeah, for sure add me in. I'd love to talk about your products as well. Those are some good power ups that we can use. And then our support staff. Part of that is your social media network. It's going to be LinkedIn. I'm not part of Facebook. I'm not part of Instagram. None of them. I love LinkedIn and I like to make a lot of personal contacts that way. Some of you are more about the social media. Definitely get involved there. Have a good support group. Close friends and family. And of course, trusted colleagues. Make sure you have a good network around you. Help other people find jobs when they need it, and then they will help you when you need it as well. So that's just some of the things when we're talking about technology and things like that. Where did that lead me? I had all those tools, all those things put around me. I could have been stronger in some things, and we're going to talk about that in a moment. And I felt I was weaker in some areas that I'm definitely improving now. But talk to everybody. When you're looking for opportunities, do not talk to anyone. Even the people that you've never heard of before, be cautious, be careful. There are, as we know, there are people out there trying to hurt other people and take their money. And this is not a time in which you want to lose more money, because if you have a severance or a nice savings, you don't want to lose it to somebody trying to scam you for that money. Be very careful who you talk to, but definitely don't neglect to talk to somebody because it doesn't sound like something you'd like to do. The title that I have now at my job is application test engineer, or something like that. And I wouldn't have thought that was a role I probably would have been interested in until I talked to the recruiter. It's just quality assurance. I'm a QA automation engineer. That's all I do. I automate. I'm involved with the teams. I do the scrum, all the things. And it's the same thing. The y just call something different. So make sure you talk to everybody. Filter out the opportunities later. My thing was when I sat down every day, I did a minimum of 20 applications on all these different sites. I talked to at least 10 people a day the first two weeks. I was hitting it very hard. Saturdays and Sundays, I took it very serious. And to me, I wasn't afraid to message a hiring manager. If they gave me their phone number or they gave me an email address, and I didn't hear back from them and I felt it was a good fit, I was on the phone with them. I was calling them, texting them, and emailing them, because the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Yeah, sure, it shows some ambition. But also it brings your resume to the top of the stack. Now, are there people out there that just throw your resume away? Yeah, probably. And maybe it'll irritate a lot of some hiring managers. But trust me, it's better to contact somebody. And of course, they've already told you the situation, what they're waiting on or things like that. But don't hesitate to follow up. Don't hesitate to send a card. And if it's really a really, if you've already interviewed and you feel like you made a really good impression and there's 10 other people making really good impressions, then you want to rise up above that. And so whether it's sending a personal note in the mail, there's services out there where you can send a little basket of food or something like that. There's very innovative ways that you could do that to show your thanks for the interview and the opportunity. You definitely want to get your name elevated higher. And that's not what this is about, but that's some of what this is about, is just bug recruiters. If you're a recruiter in the room on this call, remember, we're going to bug you. We're going to email you or text. The most irritating thing to me about this whole process was the amount of recruiters I talked to and the amount of people that didn't call me back. That really kind of irritated me a little bit, is they would, all this time I'd spent and I'd put my resume together a certain way and send it out and then I wouldn't hear anything from the recruiter ever again. They just kind of went off my list, I'll be honest with you. I bugged them, sent them text messages. They didn't have the time to call me back, so I wasn't interested in working with them in the future. I have a core of 5 recruiters now. I talk to them constantly, even now. Not constantly, but probably once or twice a month. Since I have a job, I'm definitely reaching out to them. And then just remember, it's a numbers game. Somebody's going to tell you it's not a numbers game. I'm telling you, for me personally, it was a numbers game. It was how many applications can I put out there a day, equals how many interviews I'm going to have, equals how many interviews I'm going to have, equals how many technical interviews I'm going to have, and that equals the offer. And so you want to get as many applications out there as you can. Apply for everything. Obviously, do it smart. Make sure you take care of your resume. And this is really what it taught me. looking at all that, and we're going to get into, I hope I have enough time to kind of get into some of the skills-based stuff. But what it taught me is that this journey, this game, The Legend of Bananas, it can be long. And that's not a euphemism for an actual banana. But it can be a long journey. It can be a time journey. And it can also be a very difficult one, a very hard one. And yet, on the other hand, it can be an exciting time for you if you're prepared. And I wasn't prepared for this mentally. I really wasn't prepared for it financially. I was very fortunate. But I did do some things that I believe maneuvered and put myself in a better position financially, where I was pretty set for 4, maybe 5 months bills -wise after I took care of a lot of things. And I was very blessed in that. But the next time I may not be. And so now I'm making those preparations. It can be expensive, and it can be rewarding. Meaning I was miserable the last 8 to 10 months of my job. It was horrible. And I'm not going to go into details. It was a toxic culture. And I'm not just saying that because I was fired there. But it's very toxic. There's a lot of toxic things about it. And I didn't feel like I was a very good person. I was working 60, 80 hours a week on a regular basis to keep afloat the boat. And then to be let go, it really hurt. It hurt my heart that they did it via text. And it really bothered me. It still bothers me to this day. I'll be honest with you. I took it very personally. And the vice president of operations, he did call me about a month into it. And he said, hey, if we had opportunity to bring you back, I said, no, I'm not interested. I'm going to look for something more, something better, something that will be a different culture for me. It just was not the culture that I enjoyed. I want to be able to enjoy my life. I don't want to work it away. And I hope you feel the same. These are some of the things that we could talk about. But here's my advice. And here's the rub of it all. One of the things I did was, I'm going to bring this over. I'm hoping we'll get it lined up here in just a second. But I wanted to show you my GitHub page real quick. You can go to my GitHub, ROLU315. This might I'll put it in the slide notes or whatever. But this is what I started doing. And I did it my first week of being off. It was my vacation week. I set up repos on GitHub specifically for my testing skills. And I got Cypress testing, Cypress with Cucumber. I made them public. I probably should make some of these private. But my Selenium with C#, Selenium with Java, Selenium with SpecFlow, low code performance testing. I'm going to do one with JMeter as well. By the way, we have some great courses with Automation Guild on JMeter. And so all of these things, we have a lot of great past courses for this that you could definitely take advantage of. Set up repos that demonstrate your skill set and make sure that you get this distributed. I distributed the Cypress testing one. I even went and you can do, if you're familiar with GitHub, you can kind of set up your own pipeline where it runs your code for you in their pipeline and gives you results just like you would in enterprise application. You can see I've run this like 76 times. And I mean, I set up all my configuration files. I even set up my agent. My computer is my agent. I set that up. That was a great learning experience for me. And it just gave me some more DevOps like skill sets to know, hey, I went to a job that actually uses GitHub and uses actions and uses the pipelines and uses agents. And so now I feel very confident at work because I use something that I was, but every day I spent like probably 2 to 3 hours just working, working on this repo, working on GitHub actions, learning something new. And I think that's important that you do that every single day. But definitely take advantage of like now when you're working and have money flow coming in, spend some time and setting up your repos. Remember that you may not always have a wonderful job that you have now. And this is a really good opportunity for you to expand your skill set and also to showcase that. I think that's important as well. My advice is change is inevitable. And I know I've talked a lot about my story, about some of these resources. GitHub is the biggest one that I went to for resources as far as technology goes. I use Visual Studio code, set up my own Cypress environment and everything. Did everything that I would do if I was sitting down to work and do those things. And that helped me in the interview process, by the way. That helped me be very, very comfortable staying up to speed on all my terminology. I didn't feel like I missed anything. And so my advice is to remember that change is inevitable. Being laid off doesn't define you. Embrace this as an opportunity to explore new possibilities and grow. Stay positive. Lean on your support system. And focus on personal development during this transition. You have the power to shape your future positively. And I posted this like I think a week into my layoff. And I wanted people to know that they weren't alone. I also started a support group of, I guess, of such. I started a Slack group for the ex -Scorpion I believe. I didn't know who they were. I had to kind of start feeling out and finding out who was there, who wasn't. Talked to some people that I knew that were still working there and who were texting me and things like that. I got a list of names and I invited them in. And we started just being encouraging to one another. I know another group that did that as well on LinkedIn that was laid off the same time that we work. And they even invite me to be a part of their group. That was really kind of them. But those are some of the things you can do to help you through this transition. I definitely encourage you to get LinkedIn premium. I think it will help you. I also encourage you to take your resume today. Make sure it's updated. And then there's a-I didn't put this in the slides, but there's a keyword that you need to be familiar with if you're not called ATS. And ATS is Application Tracking System. Most employers, corporations use them. I know a lot about them because I work for Civic Plus and we actually had an ATS for small government municipalities that we used and that we built. And so I know a lot about the inside terminology. However, I've been out of it for a little bit and it was all manual at that time. Now they're using, of course, AI and there's a lot of AI ATS that's going through this filtering out your resume. I don't think that a lot of these recruiter companies like LHH are up to speed on some of this terminology because they gave me a resume. It was supposed to be like up to date with all the keywords and all the things. I didn't get in hardly anything. I mean, I was getting maybe a nibble or two every once in a while. I ran mine through ChatGPT, the premium ChatGPT with the highest machine learning language or whatever it is, the latest one. I spent some money on it. It was like 20 bucks. And I simply used the keywords. I just said, here is my resume and I would like to make sure that it is up to date for companies ATS, application tracking systems. And please may suggest modifications that will help my resume. It brought back like a humongous list on top of whatever the recruiter had sent me. I understand that ChatGPT, AI bots, things like that, but not always 100 % accurate. But I mean, this was a big list. I asked ChatGPT to make the adjustments for me in my resume and to also give me the file back. I didn't have to make any adjustments. When I opened up in Word, there was a few like figure eight. Like it was just like a little bit off here and there. And so I made some changes as far as that goes. But everything, it looked amazing. And I paid 20 bucks and I'm still using ChatGPT for other things. Moral of the story is you need to make sure your resume can be seen and picked out of a crowd. If you can't do that, you won't go anywhere. Don't be too picky to not look at a job. Look at every job opportunity out there, regardless of salary, too. The current one that I'm on right now, salary was advertised much lower. I came in, killed the interview, I'm a very personal person. I know my craft. I know terminology. And I had a lot of confidence. And I said, I know what my worth is. And this is what I'm worth. And I said, this is what I bring to the table. Don't be afraid to say that in a very kind, professional way. And they paid it. Just keep in mind, all the horror stories you hear out there, they happen. And a lot of times, because people are ill prepared, a lot of times it's just bad luck, too. But a lot of times they're not doing everything they can that we talked about today to help them find the opportunities that are out there. And so I hope of anything, you remember that movement is life. Jules Verne, if you want to go back to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this guy's a great author, many other books. He said, and it is well to be able to forget the past and kill, get rid of the present by continual change. The present can suck right now because you just got laid off. You have fired. You're in a toxic situation. Whatever the case is. But you can change that by moving, doing something. Me, being angry, being sad, being depressed, that's not a thing. You should definitely talk to a physician, licensed therapist, things like that. If you are having anxiety of your job situation, you need to get professional help. I encourage you to do that. But me as a normal, healthy individual, anxiety is come if something that happens. Major life changes. And you have to know how to navigate. You have to be prepared. And being prepared will help you navigate yourself through that anxiousness. Help you find the job, find the opportunities and get out of the suckage that you're in right now and get into something much, much better. I wish you well. Thank you for paying attention to my presentation and I hope that you've enjoyed the Automation Guild this year. I know I have by the time that you've seen this presentation, I know that I will have as well with you. And if there's anything I can ever do for you, please, by all means, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Please just text me. I don't answer this phone number. But if you text me, I will get the number. I will get a text. And just tell me who you are and what you're doing. And connect with me. And I'd love to speak with you and just talk to you and try to approach you in any way I can in my spare time to help you out. Thank you and have a wonderful rest of the day.

[00:38:07] Thank you, Robert, for your Automation Awesomeness. For links of everything value we covered in this episode, head on over to testguild.com/a534. And while you're there, make sure to check out our awesome sponsor of this episode, BrowserStack, and also check out Automation Guild Replays for 2025. Alright, so that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation podcast. I'm Joe, my mission is to help you succeed in creating end-to-end full-stack Automation Awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

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[00:39:33] Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.