eFinancialCareers

I got a chilling reminder this week of just how competitive things are in the job market at the moment. Although I’m in a short-term position, I’m still applying for roles that are better suited to my long-term career aims. A headhunter sent me a job spec for a role in the structured credit risk team of a bank. It matched my skill set and experience very closely, and... Read more

For anyone out there who considers this column a purveyor of doom and gloom, the time has come to point out there are also a lot of upsides to being out of the market. Take the personal benefits: I can now get up at a civilised hour, live life at my own pace, come and go as I please, and shave twice a month. Redundancy can also have huge professional... Read more

A new era in the banking industry started this week. Globally, banks have been pumped full of government funds. Nationalisation is flavour of the month. What will government involvement or ownership mean for the banks? For banks with large investment banking arms, I would imagine the new owners will be keen to distance themselves from the kind of headlong risk-taking that has taken so much of the blame for the current... Read more

The week away has done me some good. I feel refreshed, relaxed and even a little bit tanned after spending some time away from London. A blissful state one might think. However, a quick glance at the calendar this morning shattered my feeling of goodwill. Next week is August and I have been out of work since April. What the hell have I been doing? This is genuine panic. As... Read more

2008 is over from a recruitment point of view. December is going to be a very dead month. I get the feeling that there is a general mood of exhaustion in the market and that many people are going to wait until the fresh new year before reassessing things. I did an ugly calculation this week. I divided the amount of cash I now have readily available by my monthly... Read more

My quote of the week this week goes to Christian Noyer, the governor of the Bank of France, who stated that “there is no drama in front of us”. This leaves me thinking that either Mr Noyer has an exceptionally high drama threshold, or that he has lost all perception of what is going on in the world. The travelling credit crisis circus arrived this week in Europe. It seems... Read more

I have taken my foot off the gas. Those of you who are more aggressively job hunting would tut at my lax attitude of the last few weeks. A couple of days at Wimbledon, one day of cricket at the Oval, and several days spent lying in the park with my wife and baby daughter all point to a worrying slowing in pace. I woke this morning to an ash... Read more

I have decided I need to get away from it all, to see a new horizon and get a fresh angle on things. It sounds ridiculous I know, I haven’t entered an office for over three months, but I am beginning to feel boxed in. It has got to the point where I have investigated so many avenues in search of a new job that things have begun to blur... Read more

Alistair Darling came out last week and said the UK was in the grip of the biggest downturn in 60 years. Mr Darling must wish he had been somewhere else the day Gordon Brown dropped in to offer him the job of Chancellor. His appointment in June 2007 coincided nicely with the start of the global financial chaos: talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The... Read more

The last time the UK entered a recession I was sitting my GSCEs and the biggest threat to my lifestyle was poorly timed acne. Things this time are very different. Although it remains true that acne would be an unwelcome surprise, I am now facing challenges that have been entirely absent for much of my adult life. For the last few weeks, I’ve commented on a market in free... Read more

It’s all over. The end of the once-great investment banking industry came last week. The two remaining giants, Goldman and Morgan Stanley, were forced to accept a change of status; and Merrill and Lehman respectively merged with rivals and went bust. The speed with which the landscape has altered has been jaw dropping. Emerging from the rubble is a universal banking world. And even at these early stages, the foundations... Read more

I have been reliably informed this week that networking is the key to life, the universe and everything. My transition guru offered me this eye-opening revelation. It seems that headhunters and recruitment consultants may offer a comfort blanket to those of us who have recently been handed our freedom, but when all is said and done it’s our own contacts that are more likely to hold the key to our... Read more

It's funny how not working changes your relationships with people. Despite the fact that I am financially sound, at least for the medium term, reactions of even close friends seem to have subtly altered. I’m not sure if it's the way I'm acting or whether I’m simply becoming sensitive as part of some post-redundancy rejection complex, but there definitely seems to be a difference. Take yesterday, for example. I played 18... Read more

I returned from holiday over the weekend to find the landscape of the investment banking business ravaged. Household names in the industry have disappeared overnight; others have thrown themselves together to try and stay alive. It appears that the credit crunch has mutated into financial Armageddon. For the first time since I lost my job in April, I a felt a cold clammy panic sweep across me. The industry that, for... Read more

A series of meetings this week made it startlingly clear that a good recruitment consultant can be worth his weight in gold, and a bad one can lead to abject depression. Last week, I met four of them, two of whom offered genuine support and two of whom who were clearly continuing to play in the band as the good ship credit started to slip beneath the waves. Let’s focus... Read more

Is it me or is this credit crisis getting worse? A year on from the first glimpse of trouble and the bad news seems to be accelerating rather than calming down. Each week seems to bring a heightened level of nervousness and more tales of woe. I spent Saturday playing cricket with a group of friends who make their livings in the commercial property sector; their mood was if anything... Read more

You would have thought that these would be bleak times indeed. However, as I sit here on my roof terrace, with the lush green gardens stretched out below me and the sun sparkling in a cloudless sky, it is hard to wipe the smile off my face. Yes I need to get back into the world of work and reinvigorate a career dampened by the upheaval that is going on... Read more