Until just a few decades back you could count on the education you got in college seeing you all the way to retirement. Now, you have to reinvent yourself professionally several times during your working life just to stay current. Lifelong learning is the name of the game, and training and re-skilling the tools of choice.
Losing one‘s job is one of the more severe psychological blows one can experience, similar in magnitude to a divorce. But while a divorce might actually improve your marriage skills for the next time around, especially because the skills needed remain practically identical, in a job-loss situation the skills used previously can become degraded or obsolete, in particular if the jobless period drags on, resulting over time in a skill mismatch with what the labor market requires.