Outplacement Services Editing and Proofreading Services

Someone is told at half past nine on a Tuesday that their job has gone, and at some point in the next twenty minutes they are handed an envelope. Inside is the outplacement provider's material. They will not read it that day, and they may not read it that week, but they will keep it — and what it says when they finally open it does more to shape the following six months than any workshop that comes later.

We edit what outplacement and career transition providers produce — first-week material for departing employees, programme guides and service descriptions, CV and application guidance, interview preparation and practice material, networking and market approach guidance, self-employment and portfolio career resources, financial and practical transition checklists, workshop and webinar content, coach guidance and session frameworks, manager briefing packs for those delivering the news, HR-facing programme documentation and reporting, and proposals and tender responses for employers. Our editors work on the material that arrives on the worst day.

The first-week pack is the most difficult document in this field and the most commonly written wrong, because it is drafted for the client who bought the programme rather than the person holding it. Language about maximising your potential and embracing change lands, in that envelope, as an insult. We write these so the opening acknowledges what has actually happened without dwelling on it, in two sentences, in the plain register a person in shock can absorb; so the first page contains only what must be done in the next seven days — the practical things with deadlines attached, since a checklist gives someone in freefall something to hold; so everything else is explicitly permitted to wait, because a pack that implies the job search must start on Thursday adds pressure to a person who has none to spare; so one named human being with a direct number and a real response time appears before any description of the programme; and so no sentence describes redundancy as an opportunity, an adventure or a chance to reflect on what they truly want. Providers whose first-week material reads like this get people into their programmes; the rest get engagement rates they explain away in the review meeting.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client programmes, participant material and employer information. We are editors rather than career, financial or employment advisers, and we offer no view on programme design, entitlements or individual circumstances. What we can do is make the first document sound as though a person wrote it.