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Rod Garossino remembers well the day he got his pink slip from Encana in 2012.

The Calgarian, who was doing community engagement for the energy company at the time, was very aware that low natural gas prices were taking a toll on his employer and that layoffs were a possibility. Still, while he wasn’t surprised to be given his notice, he does remember feeling suddenly and strangely cut off from his familiar, day to day life.

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“You take off your security badge and you put it on the desk, you take off your company cell phone and put it on your desk, you give back your company credit card,” Garossino recalls. “In my case, I’d been with the organization for eight years, and all of a sudden I was on the outside . . . I was no longer part of that group.”

Fast forward a little more than two years, and Garossino has crafted a new, rewarding career path for himself. As manager of a program called the Encore Fellowship, he helps to match out-of-work professionals with non-profit organizations in need of top-notch skills and expertise. Having been there himself, he’s in a good place to reassure anxious job-hunters that there is light at the end of the tunnel.