It’s December, which means more than just cooler weather and holiday celebrations. It’s also layoffs season.
Job cuts tend to spike in December and January as companies prepare for structural changes heading into the new year, as shown by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“A lot of firms are reaching their fiscal year-end,” said Rachel Sederberg, senior economist at labor markets analytics firm Lightcast. “They're taking a hard look at what's going on their balance sheets as well as how the business is performing, and they make decisions along those lines. And sometimes that has implications for workers.”
Just this past week, North Face and Vans owner VF Corp. laid off about 500 employees while cloud computing company Twilio said it would lay off about 5% of its workforce. While the labor market is still strong, experts say there will likely be an uptick in layoffs in the coming months.
Here’s which industries experts say are at-risk and what employees can do to prepare.
Which industries are cutting jobs?
The first nine months of the year saw over 13 million layoffs and discharges across the U.S., according to seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's up slightly from the same period in 2022 and 2021 but still below the 2019 pre-pandemic rate of 16 million.
Layoffs are expected to tick up in the coming months, but the numbers are expected to be “well within the norm,” according to Sederberg.
“My overall takeaway is that the sky is not falling,” she said, adding she's "not expecting broad swaths of layoffs because companies are still really trying to hire."
But certain jobs are more at risk than others. The tech industry, which saw an influx of layoffs last year, is still slashing jobs, with Layoffs.fyi tracking more than 250,000 tech layoffs so far this year.
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ByteDance, the Chinese tech company behind TikTok, is cutting hundreds of jobs as it winds down its gaming unit, Nuverse, according to CNN.
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Microchip manufacturer Qualcomm is laying off more than 1,200 roles in California.
“The industry was really hiring at such a rapid pace for two years, that as the economy started to come down a little bit, cool a little bit, they really started to do layoffs quickly,” said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
He added that while certain industries are getting hit harder, "we've seen a very clear cooling trend in the labor market this year with an increase in layoffs across every sector we track."
Media is another industry still experiencing layoffs. Challenger, Gray & Christmas in October reported more than 19,000 cuts in the industry between January and September, up 550% from the same period last year.