This recession must have been such a difficult time to lose your job. We all have mortgages to pay and being a PRO, without an income, in the middle of the biggest financial crisis since WW2, isn’t really where anyone would choose to be. Of the people you know in public relations, how many have recently changed jobs? Without putting too much thought into it, I reckon about 25% of my agency contacts have moved jobs in the last 2 years. This seems higher than was the case a few years ago. PR has always been synonymous with lots of people churn, but the recession has added pressure and many agencies have had to let people go. I’m not trying to create rage against PR agencies; their business structure means that they are likely to have to cut the wage bill to survive a recession. But what has surprised me is that the redundancies have been done fairly quietly. A couple of lines in PRWeek have been about the limit of it. The most interesting question is of course -  where have all these people gone? Well, the ones I know have either gone travelling (the younger ones), gone freelance (the better ones?), or gone in house (in terms of my contacts, intriguingly enough, exclusively to the public sector. And it will be interesting to see how that pans out over the next few years!) So, if you are a PRO and got made redundant during the recession, what happened to you? What’s your story? Are you currently living it up in Sydney? Have you built up a decent freelance operation? Or have things proved a little tougher?