How Career Transition Support Is Delivered in Turkey?
Career transition support arrived in Turkey in 1996. At that point the approach had no established name in Turkish and no counterpart on the agenda of Turkish organisations. The method had largely been defined through white-collar practice abroad: a limited number of participants, one-to-one meetings held in an office setting, and a consultancy calendar organised around individuals.
The first engagements in Turkey were carried out on markedly different ground. Production sites, large participant groups, shift patterns and regional labour markets all came into play. The method had to be rebuilt for those conditions. What organisations see today is a structure that has accumulated on that ground over close to thirty years.
The most direct way to describe the current form of the practice is to set out, in order, what the organisation and the participant encounter during the period. The programme is not a single service line but a connected sequence of stages, and the order and length of those stages change with the organisation's decision.
This article sets out how the programme runs today: the headings under which the method was shaped by local conditions, the stages the programme moves through, and the picture an organisation finds in front of it at the end of the period.
How the Method Was Shaped by Local Conditions
The framework that arrived from abroad was limited in scope and largely belonged to an office environment. From the earliest years in Turkey, the periods worked on were weighted towards industry and automotive: site closures, line closures and large-scale headcount adjustments. The method had to be rebuilt under the following headings:
• Site scale, reaching several hundred participants within the same period
• Meeting calendars built around shift patterns
• Career direction work in locations where the labour market is limited
• Separate programme flows for blue-collar and white-collar groups
• Communication planning in structures with employee representation
• The place that severance, notice and legal matters hold on the participant agenda
These headings changed the structure of the programme directly. Because one-to-one meetings are not the only route to participants at site scale, group workshops became a permanent part of the programme. Shift patterns determined the hours during which consultants would be present on site. In locations with a narrower labour market, the focus of the work shifted from moving into a new role towards changing occupational direction and self-employment.
Scale was the point at which the method was most tested in the early years. In practice abroad, the number of participants a consultant worked with in a given period was limited. In Turkey there were periods in which a single decision brought hundreds of people into the programme within the same week. That meant positioning the consultancy team on site, setting up meeting rooms within the facility, and planning the calendar by shift rather than by day.
The second heading was the participant profile. The framework that arrived had been designed largely for office employees and executives. In periods worked in Turkey, the same programme included blue-collar participants who had spent years on the same line alongside white-collar and executive groups. Work on the CV, job search method and target setting could not be run with identical content for all three.
The third heading was geography. In locations where a single employer is decisive, the likelihood of a participant moving into a new role in the same sector remained limited. In those periods the weight of the work shifted towards changing occupational direction, opportunities in neighbouring provinces and self-employment. That flexibility in the method is a direct result of projects carried out in Turkey.
The fourth heading was the language of communication. Some of the concepts used in practice abroad had no equivalent in Turkish, the name of the programme among them. Where the scope and length of the work offered to participants were not described in plain language, take-up remained low. The way the programme is explained on the participant side has therefore become simpler over the years.
The localisation of the method is reflected in its vocabulary as well. On the organisational side the subject is downsizing, change and restructuring; on the participant side it is career direction, job search method and transition timetable. The same programme has to be explained in two different registers to two audiences. Our What Is Outplacement? page sets out the definition of the approach and the scope of the service together.
Career Transition Support: The Stages the Programme Moves Through Today
Organisations' own practices played a part in this localisation. The human resources teams of industrial companies had run headcount adjustments through their own internal methods for many years. The programme did not replace those methods; it was built on top of them. An organisation's existing announcement arrangements, its leave and pay practices and its field communication became the programme's point of entry.
Local conditions changed the timetable of the period as well. In practice abroad the programme most often began after the announcement. In periods in Turkey the preparation stage begins weeks before the decision is announced, and the organisation plans announcement day as part of the programme.
What organisations see today is the result of that accumulation. The stages are standard, while the content of each stage is set by the organisation's decision and the participant group.
Implementation begins before the organisation announces its decision. During the preparation stage, the units affected, the timetable, the order of announcement and the structure of the remaining teams are worked through together. At the same stage, managers prepare for their own area of responsibility during the period. We address which levels are brought into that work in Which Management Levels Are Included in Training During a Restructuring Period?.
Announcement day is the most intensive stage of the programme. The consultancy team is on site that day. On the day a participant learns of the decision, they also learn what support is available to them, and the first meeting is most often held the same day or the following working day. The purpose at this stage is not to build a plan but to allow the participant to place the period within an understandable framework.
One-to-one meetings follow. A transition plan is built around the participant's experience, occupational direction and priorities. Work on the CV, a target organisation list, interview rehearsal and preparation for salary discussions all sit within this scope. The consultants holding these meetings have at least twenty years of experience and have carried managerial responsibility themselves, so the participant is speaking with someone who has made career decisions at a comparable level.
The first subject in participant meetings is usually not the job search but the period itself. The participant has only just learned of the decision; in the first session they set out their own position, ask their questions and learn what the programme covers. The plan is built in the sessions that follow. Keeping that order determines the pace of the later stages.
Work on the CV and on applications begins with the participant describing their experience in their own words. For someone who has spent many years with the same organisation, this is not simply document preparation but making their record legible from outside the organisation. The same applies at executive level, where finding the sector equivalent of internal job titles becomes part of the work.
Interview rehearsal is one of the most concrete elements of the programme. The participant works through how they will describe the period of departure in a recruitment interview elsewhere. This element proves decisive in particular for participants who have spent their whole career with one organisation.
Group workshops run within the same flow as the one-to-one meetings and do not replace them. Workshops cover shared subjects such as job search method, the use of digital platforms and interview technique, while the one-to-one meetings are given over to the participant's own decisions. Participants also reach digital resources outside meeting hours, which allows much of the preparation to proceed on their own timetable.
Exit-day support is a heading of its own within the work carried out on announcement day. The administrative steps the participant needs to complete that day, the information given to them and how the programme will begin are brought together in a single flow. With that flow defined, the day does not become an open-ended wait for the participant.
The length of the programme is set together with the organisation. The participant group, the structure of the period and conditions in the labour market all bear on it directly. Defining the length at the outset makes it easier for participants to build their own timetable; knowing when the programme concludes, they plan accordingly.
Contact with the labour market is another side of the programme. Building a target organisation list, following open roles within the sector and helping the participant reach those roles all sit within the scope of the work. At executive level that contact runs largely through sector networks, while in blue-collar programmes it runs through relationships with employers in the region.
Another heading we work through with the organisation at the preparation stage is the structure of the remaining teams. Who will hold which work afterwards, which duties will be merged and which teams will report to a new manager are defined before the announcement. Without that definition the period does not close with the departures; uncertainty continues in the remaining team.
The length and frequency of participant meetings are set by the scope of the programme. In some programmes meetings follow a weekly rhythm; in others they become less frequent according to the participant's own timetable. What they share is that the transition plan is built together with the participant. A plan the participant has not decided on does not progress in practice.
Where the consultancy team is based has a direct bearing on how the programme works. Take-up rises when meetings are held close to the participant's working environment. In site-scale periods the meeting rooms are set up within the facility; in office-scale periods a setting outside the organisation may be preferred.
The closing meeting held with the participant at the end of the programme shows whether the transition has been completed. With a participant who has moved into a new role, a short review of the first months is carried out. That meeting is both the close of the programme and a source that keeps the method itself up to date.
The organisational side of the programme runs in parallel. Participation rates, meeting numbers and the general picture are reported to the organisation throughout the period, while the content of participant meetings is not shared. That distinction is the basis of the programme's credibility. A participant engages with the work to the extent that they know what is discussed with the consultant does not reach the organisation.
Most organisations plan the programme as a one-off exercise. In practice, working with the same organisation across more than one period is common. The preparation stage is then shorter, since its announcement arrangements, site conditions and internal communication channels are already defined.
The flow is built on the same logic for white-collar, blue-collar and executive groups, while the content differs. At executive level the meetings extend over a longer period and access to sector networks comes to the fore. In blue-collar programmes, site conditions, travel and time constraints shape the plan.
The Picture an Organisation Sees at the End of the Period
The organisational side of the programme can be followed in figures. Since 1996 we have delivered career transition support to more than 400 organisations, 380 of them multinational. The number of people who have taken part has passed 50,000, of whom 8,000 were at executive level. Participant satisfaction runs at 98 per cent, and 80 per cent of participants move into a new role within the first six months.
These indicators carry two meanings for an organisation. The first is that the participant side of the period becomes measurable. The second is that the organisation can rely on this data in its own internal communication. When remaining teams see what support was offered to departing colleagues and how it concluded, the trust they place in the organisation is sustained.
In some periods a proportion of participants move into another role within the organisation. The scope of the programme includes that possibility; a participant's application to open internal positions is not left outside the work. For the organisation it means an experienced colleague stays.
For that picture to carry weight internally, the records kept during the period need to be orderly. Participation rates, meeting numbers, workshop attendance and transition times are tracked throughout. At the end of the period the organisation reports to its board and to employee representatives on the same data.
Another result that stays with the organisation is the experience gained by its human resources team. The announcement arrangements, the course of participant questions and the communication carried out with remaining teams all accumulate there. In the next period the organisation begins from that accumulation.
A second output is visible on the employer brand side. How departing colleagues speak about the organisation afterwards carries into its recruitment processes and its standing within the sector. This is why career transition support is assessed as an investment that shapes the outcome of the period rather than as a cost line.
We set out the development of the method in Turkey and its institutional background in detail in Outplacement in Turkey From 1996 to Today. Its present form rests on the accumulation of projects carried out since that date across industry, automotive and services.
At E&E Group we brought career transition support to Turkey in 1996 and have, since 1992, supported organisations in completing periods of downsizing, change and restructuring in a people-centred way. To review your organisation's plan for the period with us, you may get in touch
