The Day 75 ITAM Professionals Lost Their Jobs

Bill Talbot’s phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.

It started in October with a message through the ITAM Cooperative channels: “Hey Bill, got laid off yesterday. Any advice?” Then another arrived, and by the end of the week there had been five more.

By November, the messages were flooding in. Seventy-five professionals had contacted him to say they’d lost their jobs or were facing layoffs, and entire ITAM departments were being dissolved overnight.

“When I started hearing about people losing jobs,” Bill told me during our recent conversation, “we all know Asset Management is one of the most critical aspects of the entire enterprise. So I kept asking: why?”

Bill’s been in this game for 30 years. He started as an end-user support technician and got handed an email one day that basically said: “Congratulations, now you track everything.” That was 1994. He’s been tracking things ever since, building what became a legendary career in IT Asset Management.

But November 2025 felt different, and scarier than what came before.

Sacking the People Who Know Where the Licences Are

“They’re looking for quick cost-cutting measures,” Bill explains. “The entire industry is cost-cutting right now. They’re trying to remove the fat. But they don’t realise how important Asset Management is.”

I’ve seen it myself. Companies that spend millions on software licences, then fire the person who knows where those licences are. It’s like buying a Ferrari and throwing away the keys.

The worst of it is that we did this to ourselves.

Remember when everyone was passionate about ITAM? When I moved to the UK in 2013, I wrote “I’m passionate about Software Asset Management” at the top of my CV. The reviewer sent it back: “Remove this BS. Nobody’s passionate about Software Asset Management.”

I still am, because I am passionate about this work. We all were, but over the years we stopped talking about why it mattered, got comfortable and assumed everyone understood. They didn’t.

The FinOps Invasion

Then came FinOps.

It sounds dramatic, but that’s what it felt like to many ITAM professionals: an invasion. Suddenly, every company needed a Financial Operations team. Cloud spending was out of control, and someone had to do something about the AWS bills.

What makes it so frustrating is that we were already doing the work. “We were doing FINOPS with asset management before it had a name,” Bill says. “We talked about chargebacks, allocation, being proactive with financials. We understood this stuff.”

But we called it “asset management,” and that sounded boring. They called it “FINOPS,” and that sounded revolutionary.

I watched this happen at companies I worked with. New FinOps teams were hired from outside and tasked with solving problems the ITAM teams had been managing for years. Except now there were two teams competing for budget and getting in each other’s way as they tried to do the same work.

Last month, I calculated a bring-your-own-licence scenario for an international company. The company was wasting two million pounds annually because the ITAM team and FinOps team didn’t talk to each other. Two million pounds: that’s enough to pay the salaries of somebody’s entire ITAM department for a decade.

But the executives saw two separate problems requiring two separate solutions, rather than one problem that needed the two teams to work together.

When Success Makes You Invisible

When you’re good at ITAM, nobody notices.

If your licences are compliant, that’s great: nobody has to think about licensing. When your hardware refresh runs smoothly, that’s fantastic too, because nobody has to worry about equipment. And if your software deployments work perfectly, wonderful—everyone forgets that software needs managing at all.

“Over time, people stop acknowledging their own work because it becomes routine,” someone said during our live discussion. “When everything runs smoothly, recognition fades.”

It’s a wretched reward for doing the job well. Marketing teams get credit when revenue goes up and sales teams celebrate when deals close, while ITAM teams get credit when nothing goes wrong, which sounds like nothing at all.

Bill told a story about the Equifax breach (opens in new tab). Remember that disaster? When the executive had to testify before Congress, over a hundred entries in that testimony pointed to Asset Management failures. “Asset Management was not where it needed to be,” Bill explained, “even though the executives had shrugged their shoulders. It wasn’t important to them.”

But did anyone call it an ITAM failure? No. It was a “cybersecurity breach.” The Asset Management problems that enabled the breach stayed buried in congressional testimony that nobody read.

We prevent disasters that nobody sees, then get blamed when prevention fails.

The Gen Z Problem

And the problem is getting worse, because young professionals are walking away from ITAM.

“A lot of Gen Z professionals are stepping away,” someone noted during our discussion, “saying it’s not challenging enough.”

I understand why. If your introduction to ITAM is building ELPs (Effective Licence Position reports) for Microsoft and Oracle, how long before you’re bored senseless? Six months, or a year if you’re really dedicated?

Bill’s response to that was emphatic: “I’ve done it for 30 years and I’ve never been bored. Never said I’m going to walk away. It’s ever-changing, ever-evolving.”

So how has Bill stayed interested for 30 years? Because he understands that the point of an ELP is what you do with it afterwards, when you use it to make business decisions worth millions.

But we’re not teaching that. We’re treating new ITAM professionals like data entry clerks instead of business analysts. We hand them tasks without explaining where the work fits, and give them responsibilities without explaining what they’re supposed to achieve.

Bill shared a story about someone who’d done procurement tasks for seven years: receiving orders, processing purchases and sending them to vendors. That was it. When Bill walked him through the entire asset lifecycle, the guy was amazed: “I never knew I was doing half the entire lifecycle.”

We’re losing talent because we’re not showing them what they’re really doing.

The ITAM Cooperative Is Saving Careers

When Bill started the ITAM Cooperative (opens in new tab) five years ago, he wasn’t trying to save careers. He was trying to solve problems.

“I love to bring people together to collectively determine our next steps,” he told me. “That’s what I do. I focus on hearing everybody else and having that dialogue, not pontificating.”

I’ve been to their summits (opens in new tab), and they’re unlike anything else in tech. There are no vendor pitches or PowerPoint marathons, just professionals sitting around tables, talking about the problems they’re dealing with and how to solve them.

They ditched the traditional conference-style layout and set up a massive rectangular table with everyone sitting around it, facing each other. That setup got people talking to one another. It was brilliant.

More importantly, it worked. The community became somewhere people could turn to save their careers when they were facing exactly the crisis we’re talking about now.

“When you’re around peers,” Bill explained, “you realise you’re exchanging ideas with people who’ve already been where you are. They’re willing to help, provide feedback and insights. That’s where you start gaining momentum.”

Those 75 professionals who lost their jobs? Many of them found their next opportunities through connections in the community, rather than through job boards or recruiters; they found work through people who understood their value and knew where that value was needed.

Bill’s Eight Steps for Finding Work

Bill’s developed what he calls a strategy for finding your next role in ITAM. This actually works when you’re unemployed and panicking.

Start by taking a proper look at yourself, rather than just listing your skills (everyone has skills), and work out what you actually enjoy doing. “Don’t say everything,” Bill warns. “Everyone says they want to do all these ITAM activities, but you need to work on what you’re really good at.”

Then define your own job description. This approach works, even though it seems backwards. Instead of trying to match impossible job requirements (expert in IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and three other publishers, plus project management, plus business analysis, plus more), decide what you want to do and find companies that need it.

The rest follows: work on how you explain your professional experience, become involved in your community, get to know people properly, make yourself better known, develop your skills, and focus your search on opportunities that suit the work you want to do.

But following those steps means changing how you approach the search. Stop trying to qualify for every imaginable ITAM role, and concentrate on becoming the best at the particular work you’ve chosen.

Learning to Speak Money

The biggest change ITAM professionals need to make is to stop talking about licences when they’re explaining their work and start talking about the money involved.

It took me years to learn that, years spent explaining compliance percentages and inventory accuracy to executives who nodded politely and cut my budget anyway.

Now I start with the money. That two million pound waste I mentioned gets their attention, and preventing a disaster that would cost hundreds of thousands gives them a reason to care. The optimisation that reduces software spending by 15% gets the budget approved.

“How do you stop talking about licenses and start talking about money?” I asked during our discussion. That’s the question that determines whether they see your team as a cost centre or as people who make the business more profitable.

Bill’s been doing this instinctively for decades. When he talks about ITAM, he talks about what it allows the business to do, how it reduces risk and how it makes operations more efficient. The technical details come later, if at all.

The executives making redundancy decisions don’t understand Oracle licensing models. They do understand revenue impact, cost savings, and competitive advantage. Speak to them in those terms, or accept that they’re not interested in what you do.

What FinOps and Cybersecurity Need from ITAM

The future of ITAM depends on working with FinOps teams and cybersecurity departments, using what we know to help them do their jobs instead of treating them as intruders on our territory.

Think about it logically. FinOps teams understand cloud costs but don’t know the applications generating those costs. Cybersecurity teams need to secure assets but don’t know what assets exist or where they are. ITAM teams have the data both groups need, but often can’t explain it in terms that make sense for the work those teams are doing.

The professionals thriving in 2025 understand Asset Management, financial operations, cybersecurity and business strategy, and can explain their work to people in each of those disciplines. They manage assets while enabling other departments to do their jobs better.

When a cyber attack happens, IT managers ask: “Where else do we have these devices or software?” The ITAM team that can answer immediately becomes a hero. When cloud costs spike unexpectedly, finance asks: “What applications are driving this usage?” The ITAM team that can provide context becomes invaluable.

But that only happens if you can explain what you know in terms they understand and use it to solve their problems, rather than confining yourself to the work of your own department.

That CV Reviewer Was Wrong

Let me tell you something that CV reviewer didn’t understand back in 2013: passion for ITAM isn’t BS. It’s the only thing that will save your career.

Because this work is hard: you have to put up with clunky tools, messy data and brutal politics, and get very little recognition for any of it. If you don’t genuinely care about getting it right, you’ll either burn out or get pushed out.

But if you do care (if you’re fascinated by the complexity of modern IT estates, get excited about working out how to optimise them, and are determined to get the data right) then you’ll find ways to make yourself indispensable.

Bill’s still here after 30 years because he loves the work. I’m still here because solving licensing puzzles feels like winning games. The people thriving in ITAM are the ones who can’t imagine doing anything else, and it isn’t the number of certifications they have or the size of their budgets that keeps them there.

Don’t be embarrassed by that passion; use the enthusiasm you have for the work to your advantage in your career.

What Happens Next

The 75 professionals who contacted Bill aren’t victims of inevitable technological disruption. They’re casualties of an industry that stopped explaining why its work mattered to the organisations that depended on it.

Some will find new ITAM roles and continue the important work of managing enterprise assets. Others will move into related fields—FinOps, cybersecurity, IT governance—where they can apply the expertise they’ve developed through their work in ITAM. A few will leave technology entirely, taking their analytical and process skills into different industries.

But the ones who’ll thrive are those who understand how ITAM is changing and can see that the profession isn’t disappearing. They’ll be able to apply their expertise to the new demands on the job while preserving the fundamental discipline that makes Asset Management valuable.

“We can help better communicate,” Bill said as our conversation wound down. “Being able to do that connection. That’s what makes it fun. When you realise you’re on the right path, that’s the fun part.”

What we need to do is straightforward enough to explain, but hard to put into practice. Learn to show the business value of your work, build genuine relationships with people in your profession, and develop skills that complement the expertise you already have. Establish yourself as someone who helps make the organisation’s decisions, rather than someone who’s simply given tasks to carry out.

Most importantly, remember why this work matters. Every organisation depends on IT assets to function, and somebody has to understand, manage and optimise those assets. That somebody could be you, but only if you’re willing to fight for your place in the profession.

Bill Talbot’s ITAM Cooperative continues to support professionals who are looking for work or deciding where to take their careers next. Their next summit is in Knoxville, Tennessee, because sometimes the best career advice comes from peers who’ve had to deal with the same problems themselves.