It usually starts with a letter or a quiet meeting. There’s a voluntary programme, a generous number, and a deadline. After 25 or 30 years at the same carmaker or supplier, you do the math at the kitchen table, and it works. The house is paid off. The kids are grown up. You sign.
The first few months are wonderful. You finally take the long trip through New Zealand. You play golf on a Tuesday morning. You sleep without setting an alarm.
Then, somewhere around month six or nine, something shifts. Nobody calls anymore. Your calendar is empty, and not in a nice way. You notice you’ve started telling people what you used to do instead of what you’re doing now.
This is the part nobody talks about when the package is on the table.
A wave, not a trickle
This isn’t a handful of people. Germany’s car industry is going through its biggest shake-up in decades.
According to EY’s latest analysis, employment in the German automotive industry fell 6.2% in 2025 to about 725,000, the lowest level in 14 years. At suppliers alone, jobs dropped 11% in a single year and 23% since 2019.
Manager Magazin, in its October 2026 cover report based on an exclusive Roland Berger study, expects the industry to lose another 200,000 jobs by the end of the decade, and says the low point hasn’t been reached yet. The same issue puts it bluntly: German corporations are letting tens of thousands of managers go.
At Mercedes-Benz, a severance programme open to around 40,000 employees in Germany ended in March 2026, with roughly 5,500 people taking the money, as Stuttgarter Zeitung reported citing Handelsblatt.
Handelsblatt wrote that long-serving Mercedes staff were offered six-figure sums in some cases.
Other players are following. Volkswagen, Porsche and Conti all announced thousands of cuts in a single week, and another large voluntary programme is set to run from October 2026 to the end of 2027, according to automobil-produktion.
And this time it reaches the management floors too. In its October 2026 cover story, “Existenzangst haben alle” (“Everyone is afraid for their livelihood”) by Henning Hinze, Manager Magazin reports that around 5,000 of Volkswagen’s 21,500 management positions worldwide are set to disappear. BMW’s planned 8,000 job cuts are aimed mainly at senior staff. Mercedes has already let go more than 5,500 employees through its “Next Level Performance” programme, preferably well-paid managers, using severance packages and early retirement. The number of unemployed managers in Germany reached around 49,000 in 2025, the highest since records began in 2015, and 14% more than the year before.
A headhunter who places top executives put it more bluntly to the magazine:
“Over the past 30 years there were always economic ups and downs and special situations. But now? Now the Titanic is sinking.”
Executive search consultant, manager magazin, October 2026
Employment lawyer André Kasten warns: “The really big wave is still to come. This winter it will get really dark.”
So many experienced people, many in their mid-50s, are stepping out at the same time. And most of them are going in with a plan for their money, but not for their days.
The 30-year holiday that lasts about 8 months
Here’s the fantasy: I’ve worked hard, I’ll travel, I’ll finally relax.
Here’s what we actually hear from people a year later:
“I didn’t miss the job. I missed being needed.”
“I was on a beach in Portugal and caught myself checking whether anyone had emailed.”
“My wife said, lovingly, that I need something to do that isn’t reorganising the garage.”
None of this means taking the package was a mistake. It means work was doing more for you than paying the bills. It gave you structure. People who counted on you. Problems worth solving. A clear answer to “So, what do you do?”
Handelsblatt Live described this well when writing about senior leaders who’ve lost their roles: beneath the financial hit you’ll find disbelief and hurt, and the higher someone has climbed, the more their job tends to define who they are. Take away the title, and a surprising amount of the person goes with i
It is rarely about survival. More often it is about lifestyle: the house in Mallorca, the chalet in Kitzbühel, and above all “the fear of no longer counting for anything” in their social circle. After a long career, the feeling becomes: “I now have a flaw, I’m one of the losers.”
We’ve written before about how quickly that happens, in Who’s Who to Who’s That and When the Calendar Goes Quiet.
Why it hits engineers and managers so hard
Car people are builders. For decades your week had a rhythm: launches, audits, the plant, the platform, the next model year. You solved hard, concrete problems with a team around you.
Travel is lovely, but it doesn’t give you a problem to solve. Golf doesn’t need your 30 years of experience. After a while, the absence of challenge starts to feel heavier than any workload ever did.
There’s also a quieter issue. Many people leave together, so their old colleagues are in the same boat, and the social circle that came from work fades faster than anyone expected. What remains of your network after you leave is a question we explore in What Remains of Your Network When You Leave.
One man’s second act
The SWR told the story of Markus Paule, 55, who spent more than 30 years at Mercedes in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim developing drive systems and leading teams. He took the voluntary package. He didn’t disappear onto a cruise ship. He now heads a department at an adult education centre, building learning programmes.
His measure of success is simple: how much energy he has on the drive in each morning and the drive home each evening. He says he’s clearly happier than before. Towards the end at Mercedes, he’d been “saving himself from weekend to weekend.”
Manager Magazin tells a similar story. Erhard Barho, 59, spent 28 years in large corporations, starting at Continental in 1997 and later building businesses in China and the Americas. When his role ended, the job market felt like “an absolute disaster”. So he went his own way and now works as an independent adviser to investors and Mittelstand companies on China strategy and technology. His verdict today:
“I’m really up for doing something new. And I wouldn’t even say I’m leaving the corporate world.”
Erhard Barho, manager magazin, October 2026
He just works for many companies now instead of one.
That’s the point. The package can be a genuine gift, as long as it funds a next chapter rather than replacing one.
What actually helps
You don’t need a five-year plan. You do need a few honest answers.
Take the break, but give it an end date. Three months, six months. Enjoy it fully. Then start.
Ask what you’ll miss, not just what you won’t. Is it the team? The problem-solving? The status? Be honest. Each answer points to a different path.
Stay visible. Keep your LinkedIn alive, stay in touch with people, keep a view on the industry. The longer you go silent, the harder it is to come back. See Why Waiting Until You Leave Is the Costliest Mistake and The Brand You Already Have.
Think in portfolios, not jobs. Board or advisory roles, interim assignments, teaching, a few days a week. There are more options than “full-time again” or “retired.” Read The Portfolio Executive, The 3-Day Week Executive and The Playbook for Landing Your First Board Seat.
Consider building or buying something. Many former managers are well suited to advising or owning a business, especially with Germany’s Mittelstand facing a succession crunch. See From Executive to Owner and The Mittelstand Succession Crisis.
Protect the money while you work out the purpose. A large one-off payment invites rushed decisions, and it may not last as long as it feels. Stuttgart employment lawyer Stefan Nägele calculates in manager magazin that a €600,000 to €650,000 package comes to roughly €350,000 after tax, which is usually two to two and a half years of net salary. “If you’re pushed out at 57, that won’t get you to retirement.” Our guide on where the money should go is a good place to start.
Talk to someone who has done it. Not a motivational poster, but a peer who has stood exactly where you’re standing.
The real question
Taking the package isn’t the end of your story. It’s a question: what do you want the next 20 or 30 years to be about?
Travel can be part of the answer. Rest can be part of it too. But for most people who spent decades building cars, companies and teams, the answer also includes being useful, being challenged, and being part of something.
As we wrote in End of a Career: the challenge is the transition, not the exit.
If you’ve taken the package, or you’re weighing one, we’d be glad to talk. At WiseForce Advisors, we’re senior executives who’ve been through these transitions ourselves, and we help others find what comes next.
