As you say in your editorial, the new openings often require different skills than those used by the person being made redundant. As a result, you need to learn new skills to take up a new position. But then we often have to learn new skills to stay in our current position too, so I see the retraining issue as a bit of a red herring.

Yes, I feel sad for, sorry for and, to an extent, responsible for anyone whose job has suffered at all as a result of what I do. However, I also realise that if my work has any value at all, it's helping the company as a whole to stay in business, so that's my part in safeguarding a much larger number of jobs. Of course it's easy to rationalise all this as small sacrifices for the wider benefit. However, I'm careful to recognise we're talking about real people here, each depending on their own job for an income to support themselves and their families. So long as I don't trivialise this by just focussing on faceless statistics, I can live with the impact (good and bad) of what I do, and can sleep at night.