Middle managers accounted for nearly a third of all layoffs in 2023, up from around 20% five years earlier. In 2024, Gartner predicted that through 2026, 20% of organizations would be using AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of their middle management positions. And that prediction is being borne out by the data. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that manager head count fell by 6.1% between May 2022 and May 2025, while in Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2025 survey, “41% of employees told us that their organization has slashed management layers.”
There have always been periods when companies are laying people off. But there is something different about this latest round. Gallup data show the average number of direct reports per manager jumped from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, which is a near-50% increase since 2013. This means that the departing managers aren’t being replaced; their teams are simply absorbed into someone else’s span of control. To put it bluntly, it’s not just jobs that are disappearing, but roles.
Last year, I argued that companies should reimagine the middle manager’s role rather than getting rid of it. Some are doing that, but most are not—and if you’re in the middle of your career, with real experience behind you but too many working years ahead to simply wait this out, then you can’t afford to wait and find out what’s going to happen to your job. This piece is about what you need to be doing instead.
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The problem with “getting back out there”
After any rejection, whether romantic or professional, the standard advice is the same: “Get back out there.”
Notice that this advice contains a hidden assumption: that there still exists. But increasingly, there is no there there. The coordination, reporting, and monitoring work that filled a middle manager’s calendar is being absorbed by AI. The traditional career ladder is disappearing, so the instruction to “Get back to where you were” points people at a target that has been removed from the map.
When a job disappears, you can wait for the market to come back. But when a role disappears, there’s nothing to wait for. So the way forward is not to search harder for the old destination. Rather, it’s to stop trying to recover the past, and instead start building the future. Here is how to do just that.
Run the recovery as a portfolio
The traditional mindset is to stake it all on a single bet: Wait till you land the equivalent role. But this is a mistake. Why? Two reasons.
First, nobody knows which roles will still exist in two years—not you, not the experts, and certainly not the companies doing the cutting. And when you can’t predict which door will open, putting everything on one guess is less a plan than a high-risk gamble.
Second, the single bet costs you money while you wait—every month it doesn’t land, savings shrink and the résumé ages—whereas small bets with immediate payoffs give you the chance to learn and potentially earn additional income. Each small bet tells you something about what people will actually pay you for, and which new direction has legs.
The solution is the same as it is for companies: Instead of staking your career recovery on a single bet, run the rebuild as an innovation portfolio—a collection of different bets with different risks and different payoffs, weighted to fit your circumstances. If you need income urgently, load up on sure things (fractional work, contracting, consulting in the domain you know cold) while keeping one genuine moon shot alive. If you have runway and appetite, tilt toward the bigger bets. The shape is yours to choose; what’s not optional is the spread.
This applies even if you still have the salary, because when your income, career, and professional identity all depend on one job in a declining role class, you haven’t avoided the single bet—you’re living it. That dependency can breed panic, and diversifying while employed is the best way to make your next move a choice rather than a scramble.
From titles to the things themselves
The instinct after a layoff is to keep introducing yourself by the old title. And when roles are stable, this makes sense; in such an economy, “VP of Operations” is an efficient shorthand that signals pedigree. But the same three words now name a role class in decline, and rather than pedigree and quality, they signal cost.
The fix is translation—breaking the title down into the skills and experience underneath it. You ran workshops: That’s training design. You onboarded new managers: That’s coaching. You untangled the vendor crisis nobody else would touch: That’s negotiation under pressure. Sit down and name them, one by one, with evidence for each.
Do this and you solve two problems at once. One is yours: After 20 years of the title answering the question for you, you may not actually know everything you offer. The other belongs to the market. Employers need to understand how you can help them, and they won’t do this work on your behalf. If the page doesn’t say “training design,” nobody infers it for you.
Learn the thing that took the job
The first two moves share a limit: They work with what you already have. The portfolio spreads your old skills across more bets. The translation puts new labels on your old wins. Do both perfectly, and you’re still offering the market the same person it just said no to. At some point, the rebuild needs something new in the offer. And the most valuable new thing is hiding in plain sight: learning to use the technology that took your role.
Displaced managers are not starting from zero. Getting good work out of AI is mostly a management problem—you have to know what to hand over and what to keep, you have to know what to double-check, and you have to know where things usually go wrong, and when to step in.
Lots of younger workers know the tools, but they’ve never run anything. Lots of managers have run things for decades, but they won’t touch the tools. The person who can do both—who can manage people and AI together—is someone the market is going to reward. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of hiring processes will test candidates for both AI skills and for AI-free skills like “problem-solving, evidence evaluation, and judgment without human assistance.” This is a huge opportunity for the middle manager.
Four steps to rebuild
Whether you’re rebuilding already or starting early, here are four steps you can start today
1. Diversify your portfolio—starting this week, with one new bet matched to your gap. Savings dwindling? Paid work this month, prestige irrelevant. Runway? The bet you’ve been circling. Still employed? Your salary is the sure thing—add one your employer doesn’t control.
2. Write the no-titles inventory. One page of what you can do, with evidence for each claim—and not a job title anywhere on it. Build it by translating wins: The workshops you ran become training design, the crisis you untangled becomes negotiation under pressure, the managers you onboarded become coaching.
3. Rebuild one workflow with AI. Status reporting, scheduling, budget tracking—pick a task you run, or used to, and rebuild it with AI tools. A lesson and a demo in one.
4. Teach what you built. Walk a colleague through it, run a lunch-and-learn, write a short post about what worked. Teaching turns private learning into public proof—and it’s the fastest way to become known for the new thing instead of the old title.
The canary in the coal mine
Middle managers are not outliers. Rather, they are early warning signs of a change that is coming to the world of work. As AI absorbs more of the coordination and analysis that define white-collar work, more professionals in more fields will discover that there is no “there” to get back to.
In a world where roles are disappearing, rebuilding stops being a crisis response and becomes a permanent professional competency—something you practice before you really need it. And the professionals who start now are the ones who will flourish in the future.
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