#layoffs

#layoffs

Nine months into President Donald Trump's second term in office, he and his education secretary Linda McMahon have essentially gutted the 45-year-old Department of Education as they work toward their "final mission" of shutting it down. First, they cut millions in grants and terminated hundreds of contracts. Then, they eliminated nearly 2,000 employees via buyouts and layoffs, slashing the department's staff from just over 4,000 to about 2,400.

Automation, digitalization and geographic shifts are redefining our workforce needs and skill requirements.

Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment, the developer of The Division series, Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is offering some employees volunteer buyouts as it attempts to "realign" its teams, the company said in a post on X. The move is designed to "strengthen our roadmap," Massive wrote, as it focuses on The Division series along with its Snowdrop engine and Ubisoft Connect. Ubisoft notably didn't mention Star Wars and Avatar in that statement, an omission that may effectively spell the demise of those franchises.

After leaving StubHub to join Fandom in 2019, Miller oversaw the company's $50 million acquisition of a number of entertainment content platforms from Red Ventures including TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot, and Giant Bomb. At the time, Miller said that the deal was meant to "expand our business capabilities and provide immersive content for our partners, advertisers and fans." The deal also led to multiple rounds of layoffs for the editorial staff at some of Fandom's newly-acquired properties.

Point32Health announced it is laying off 254 employees on Monday, its second round of reductions this year. The non-profit company said in a statement that the layoffs are part of an effort to reduce administrative costs as it continues to experience unprecedented increases in medical care and pharmaceutical costs. Point32Health also cut 110 jobs in March. The company has about 4,000 employees, it reports on its website.

RAND Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank highly dependent on federal government funding, shed more than 11% of its global workforce on Tuesday, Oct. 21, a spokesman for the nonprofit said late Monday. Just under a third of the layoffs are effective Nov. 2 at the nonprofit's headquarters, according to a filing with the state's Employment Development Department. The layoffs were first mentioned publicly by RAND on career networking website LinkedIn.

Professionals are less concerned about layoffs, a recent survey from Indeed found. At this point, 31% say they're worried about layoffs at their companies, down from 39% a year ago. Even more dramatically, 41% would consider looking for a new job if their company had layoffs that didn't directly impact them -- this is down significantly from 70% a year ago.