Speaking to BBC News NI, Mr Donaldson said he joined Fraser Partners – previously known as Fraser Estates – in 1986 as a civil engineer, before being asked to take on a housing development management role in 2016.<\/p>\n
After suffering two strokes, the 63-year-old, who lives in Belfast, took eight weeks off work before returning on a phased basis.<\/p>\n
However, he said he “never in a million years” expected to be told his employment was coming to an end during a regular weekly meeting.<\/p>\n
“It was such a shock to me that after 40 years of association with the company that I was let go,” he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Donaldson said he was extremely disappointed, and his mental health suffered “tremendously”.<\/p>\n
“Two weeks after I found out I was let go was the worst of my life because I didn’t know if I had a future at all,” he added.<\/p>\n
“When you have a stroke, it changes your life, you wonder: ‘How am I going to look after my family?’<\/p>\n
“You have no income, you don’t have a job. You wonder where the next step is coming from.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaking to BBC News NI, Mr Donaldson said he joined Fraser Partners – previously known as Fraser Estates…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[64,63,99,180],"class_list":{"0":"post-49087","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-jobs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}